Suji Kwock Kim is author of Notes from the Divided Country, Private Property, Notes from the North, and Disorient, which is forthcoming. Notes from the Divided Country received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets (selected by Yusef Komunyakaa), the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (selected by Charles Simic), the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers/Northern California Book Award, The Nation/“Discovery” Award, and was a finalist for the Griffin Prize; Private Property, a multimedia play performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; Notes from the North, which received the International Book & Pamphlet Award (selected by Michael Schmidt, Neil Astley, and Amy Wack), Untitled, and And the Pursuit Of, two pamphlets forthcoming in the U.K. She is 2023 Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, and 2024 Writer-in-Residence at the Gladstone Library in Wales. Selections from Disorient received three Poetry Society of America awards, among others, and are appearing or forthcoming in numerous anthologies and international publications. Her work has been performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus at Pablo Casals Hall, Tokyo; Chorusorganisation, Koreanische Frauengruppe and Japanische Fraueninitiative in Berlin; the Solera Quartet at the Art Institute of Chicago; Dalhousie University Orchestra in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; and recorded for BBC Radio, National Public Radio, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Free Amsterdam, Radio Free Genoa, the Library of Congress, Poetry Archive (U.K.), and translated into Spanish, Russian, German, Italian, Croatian, Korean, Japanese, Bengali and Arabic.
NEW WORK
ASYLUM
The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed.
― Ocean Vuong
1
So this is the Promised Land/ Britannia
What luck/ Who wouldn’t want a better life
digging dirt on a marijuana farm/ laying bricks/ cutting hair or painting nails in Birmingham
breathing fumes of acetone/ isopropyl acetate/ ethyl acetate/ chloride/ sodium lauryl sulfate
Quan Âm/ Goddess of Compassion / what did you dream
when you were alive? I dreamed/ of helping my family pay off loan-sharks so I left
Ha Tinh to work/ washing dishes in Bulgaria/ chopping chickens in Romania
picking plums in Hungary/ sleeping in orchards/ fast-food factories/ “Chinois” restaurants
to send money home/ getting arrested/ trapped in a migrant camp in Eisenhüttenstadt
on the German-Polish border/ escaping into the forest/ drinking water from a bog
until my parents could sell their ox to pay for passage/ They wept
begged me to return/ “soft slavery” they called it/ but how soft
How hard/ could it be to pay off their debts/ Who wouldn’t want
a better life/ Who wouldn’t want more?
Soon, soon hissed the fields of rapeweed in Bierne where we waited
to board the white lorry/ animals crammed on an ark
driving past Dunkirk/ Ostend/ Bruges/ Zeebrugge/ ferrying across the North Sea on a ship
called Clementine/ O my darling/ to Tilbury Port in Purfleet-on-Thames/ O my darling
2
Dear Empire/ Dear Home Office even locked in a lorry my soul/ linh hồn/ dreamed
My soul could see/ the City brokers trading in futures or bonds/ We dreamed
locked in the refrigeration unit/ the driver watching a wee bit of Netflix
as we beat the walls/ scraping our nails on steel doors
breaking a metal pole trying to punch through the roof
screaming Open/ lungs burning oxygen vanishing
It’s Tuan/ I’m sorry I cannot take care of you
stewing in our sweat/ stripping down/ mouths frothing as if the lorry were on fire
Mum It’s all my fault/ I can’t breathe
hoping they’d unlock the doors if only we would keep quiet, and wait —
We drink the air/ the hours like water/ spirits thirsting
We drink and drink and cannot drink enough
Give them air quickly don’t let them out
steam hissing from flesh when the doors finally open
Snake-slough/ between the self left behind and the self moving on
like a flayed man shivering, holding his bloody skin in his hands, grasping a self only when it’s passed —
Oh my god you fucking fuck
heads bowed on both sides of the road as the ambulances pass/ sirens wailing
“from which you prefer to avert your gaze” —
“visa: from the past participle of videre, to see”
Or not to see/ inside the container lies
another container and inside that container lies what cannot be contained
I talk to him in one tongue/ he answers from the morgue
― Diana Khoi Nguyen
3
They tracked the traffickers
to Basildon, Birmingham, Tottenham,
County Down, County Monaghan, County Armagh.
Sentence at the Old Bailey: 39 counts of manslaughter.
The head-hunters in Frankfurt, Budapest, Bucharest know:
it’s dirty work, keeping your hands clean.
Business. It’s only business.
We still owe them money for murdering our son.
4
[=> Voice call unanswered]
[=> Voice call unanswered]
[=> Voice call unanswered]
5
I can’t erase his voice. My son’s face inside
the little black machine. His eyes his words his breath still alive
inside. I can’t bear to listen
but I can’t bear to delete them because part of me would die too.
Mum, why don’t you answer?
I’ve been dead all night.
His words: shrapnel in the mind.
Part of me is already dead, his voice a voice-over,
waves of data, pixels of last breath crossing the continent
until his body can be returned to us in a box —
HUMAN REMAINS:
HANDLE WITH CARE.
And what did they give him?
A bucket in the corner for piss and shit.
And what did I give him?
Only silence.
And now?
Only the great silence, bearer of many names including God.
(Note: The poem quotes a line from Solmaz Sharif ’s “Visa,” as well as testimony from the police
investigation of the lorry deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants in Purfleet-on-Thames, Essex.)
©2025 Suji Kwock Kim