My Books

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Eros, Unbroken

Winner, 2021 Library of Virginia Literary Award in Poetry
Finalist, 2020 Foreword INDIES Poetry Book of the Year
Winner, 2019 Washington Prize

Read Karen Llagas’ review in RHINO.

“In Eros, Unbroken, a work of both intellect and devotion, we read desire, ache, violence, grief, the body, music, memory, echoes. Here is charged beauty, the rich and generous consciousness in which nothing is forgiven, everything laid bare. The lyrical and narrative genius of these poems interweaves two voices—one that’s contemporary and autobiographical and one in the persona of an eighteenth-century castrato opera singer. Here is real music, with contrasting viewpoints, tones, and textures, refracting and echoing themes as only Annie Kim can make.”

—Peg Alford Pursell, author of A Girl Goes Into the Forest and Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow

“Art and loss, trauma, the past both fixed and evolving, the limits of love amid the ceaseless currents of desire—these are some of the strands that comprise Annie Kim's richly interwoven second book. The range of Eros, Unbroken is broad yet focused, its craft subtle and sure. In dialogues, extended meditations, and haunting lyric poems, Kim illuminates what it means to live in time.” 

—Don Bogen, author of Immediate Song and An Algebra

“Moving, captivating—fascinating—threads course through this terrific poetry collection by Annie Kim. But what I want to address here is the precision and beauty of telling. Kim's mastery of language itself—her lexical choices—and her ability to activate the reader's senses through stunning and surprising imagery is what pushes me through each line to the next. “[I]t’s you I want again,” her speaker demands of Eros, ‘your monstrous / light knocking my stained-glass window, / black ink of you raining swift down / parched map of me, blurring all my capitals. / That, at least, was irreparable.’ ”

—Martha Rhodes, author of The Thin Wall and The Beds

INTO THE CYCLORAMA

Winner of the 2015 Michael Waters Poetry Prize

“Immersive, inclusive, encircling, a cyclorama gives us a 360˚ view of things.  Annie Kim’s wonderful first book, Into the Cyclorama, is equally embracing, equally attuned.  She can pan across points of view as well as points of origin, from the Greek ode to the traditional Korean lyric sijo, as her formal dexterity finds shape in both the solo voice and choral harmonies, in etude as well as rag.  Each poem is beautifully distinctive—whether long or short, serial or singular, plain or as intricately shaped as a fractal or a fugue.  Throughout, Kim’s complex narrative skill depicts a self, a family, and the myriad “hidden strings” of cultural identity formed by this poet’s panoramic and symphonic sense of history.” 

—David Baker, author of Swift: New and Selected Poems and Scavenger Loop

“At the heart of Annie Kim’s work are questions of vision and scale.  How is the personal refracted through the historical?  How is the present substantiated by the past?  In poems that are as exact as they are charged, Kim faces her questions with ‘the kind of love / that is attention mainly.’  And far from claiming sure answers for questions that are necessary but mutable, Into the Cyclorama instead brings its reader deep into seeing, thinking, and making—deep into the processes that make us who we are.  ‘Incompletion means I’ll live,’ declares one of the speakers in Kim’s poems, highlighting the fierceness to know—not to mention the heartbreak and bliss—that defines this powerful debut collection.”

—Rick Barot, author of The Galleons and Chord

“As a cyclorama allows us to ‘step inside the painting,’ this debut collection by Annie Kim allows us to inhabit ‘the bliss and the shame’ of a life tensed between cultures, Korean and American, and to live inside the language woven to reconcile them. ‘You see what happens / when I look. I turn one thing / into another, I invent / my own brand of clarity.’ Clarity remains constant in poems that evoke and question familial and historical destiny, and that come to recognize how ‘imperfection/ is the form I want to take.’ Through its own modest imperfections and with uncommon depths of feeling, Into the Cyclorama locates ‘the garden of your dreams, the dirt of dreams. Call it home.’ “ 

—Michael Waters, author of The Dean of Discipline and Celestial Joyride

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BORDER LINES

—Edited by Mihaela Moscaliuc and Michael Waters

”Map of Korea, 1950” is one of the poems about migration and immigration collected in this outstanding anthology by Penguin Random House.