The warmth of art and fragments of life gathered by three female poets.
A tender confession connecting life and art

"Art Over Romance" is a collection of essays by three female poets in which they revisit the traces of art in their lives.
It is a delicate record and confession that reflects on life's emotions such as love and loss, sadness and longing through a single painting, a single piece of music, and a single sentence.
They say that art is not simply an object to be looked at and appreciated, but also includes the traces of comfort it leaves behind as it passes through our lives.
Therefore, this book restores the shady moments of life and brings back forgotten emotions through various artistic genres such as literature, music, film, and art.
The longing in front of the piano, the story of Van Gogh's bread and dance, the resonance left by books and movies, and memories of failed loves and past relationships are contained in quiet, solid sentences.


The stories of authors who embraced and contemplated art in their own ways are diverse.
From Cho Yong-pil to Anne Shirley, from her first poetry collection to corsets, Lee Woon-jin's thoughts on the quiet power of art that has always soothed the corners of life; Kim Yun-sun's unique sensibility that explores the place of art by erasing the boundaries between classical, jazz, and pop songs and weaving together the threads of film and memory; and Kang Mi-jeong's deep and warm gaze that finds art not only in the fields where work songs were sung and in the traces of history engraved on stones, but also beyond family, body, and everyday emotions.
Although the three people faced different lives, they each proved in their own style how art played a tender role in helping them endure life.
In a word, this book is a story about how we learned love and life from art.

Rather than praising or explaining art with grand theories, this book has a gentle yet genuine resonance in that it records the personal memories and emotions of female poets who live among us.
Because the traces of those who have lived believing in art will eventually become a mirror that reflects the emotions of someone else.
What this book teaches us is that art can help us discover the fragments of our hearts that we long to understand and the indelible emotional threads that bind us to our memories.
And it also enlightens us that that moment is the time to move towards reconciliation and comfort.
For readers who, like the three women, want to explore themselves and navigate life through art, and for those who want to revisit all the things they once loved and suffered through the language of art, this book will reach out to them without saying a word.