Poet's words

Part 1

Sound poem
Minimal life
siesta
Stay by my side
The world is burning
Knocking on Heaven's Door
bloody bread
barter
laundry room
The mad dog is coming
People without a past
Repeat playback
Taste of various countries
Departure
There are too many plums
A blessing in disguise

Part 2

Nothing much. It snows occasionally.
Cube
microcosm
F/W
goodbye
F/W
No exceptions
waiting room
The sound of a person falling
amusement park
About a man trapped in winter
A woman walking a dog
As if everything was over
No manual
You can only know your fortune in your later years.
Miguiga
hospital
Everything in your house

Part 3

A house where one lives alone
A table with a white smell
that
Go to your house
You keep stopping
For reasons we don't know
eye of the typhoon
Roofless house
Summer in the Water
Visible light at night
The Light of Coins
intake
pit
Ghost at the Window
orchard
snowstorm

epilogue
In this endlessly recurring dream (Hwang In-chan)

The twenty-year path Kang Seong-eun has walked
A poem with a deep and wide range that makes you stop and listen

Kang Seong-eun's fifth poetry collection, "Slow Slow," has been published.
The poet, who began his career by winning the Munhakdongne New Writer's Award in 2005 and is now celebrating his 20th anniversary, has shaken up and made the familiar world unfamiliar by bringing out reality and unreality, consciousness and unconsciousness, and incomprehensible sensations and images through four poetry collections: "I Fell Asleep with My Shoes on," "Just a Little Strange," "Lo-fi," and "Nothing's Wrong, It Snows Sometimes."
『Lo-fi』, written while looking at the social disasters of the Sewol Ferry Disaster and sexual violence in the literary world, won the 26th Daesan Literary Award, receiving high praise for “translating a horrific world into transparent language while briskly traversing a dark and anxious world.”


In the extension of that trajectory, this collection of poems speaks with even greater power.
As critics have pointed out, reading his poetry is not “an act of crossing from one world to another,” but rather “an act of the world we have lived in collapsing completely” (literary critic Jang Eun-jeong).
I have no doubt that the voice that begins again in that broken place, that is, the story that is written repeatedly in “nights of anxiety, sadness, and sleeplessness,” will lead us to “a world of comfort, reassurance, and deep sleep” (literary critic Kim Na-young).
"Slow Slow" condenses the journey so far, honestly staring at the recurring nightmare-like reality while revealing the desire to stay together in the end.


The sound of a fan on a summer night
The sound of a winter window freezing
The sound of the door of sleep opening
The sound of the night wearing white mourning clothes

When I was seventeen
When I was twenty
When I was thirty-seven
The sound of returning to the mind of a nine-year-old

If poetry has a sound
Is this it?

Chewing carrots
Silent Night

Listen quietly
Stopped and then started again
_ "Sounding Poem" section

Knock on the door of the in-laws' house.
Each of the 50 poems included has a different sound.
From “Sounding Poem” to “Snowstorm,” Kang Seong-eun’s poetry is performed with a deep and wide range of sounds.
It is not just a beautiful sound, but a sound that cannot be ignored and must be listened to.
It is “pulling up reality through dreams and expressing the unclear world precisely through its uncertainty itself.
At first glance, it may seem like a contradiction, but this is precisely what Kang Seong-eun's poetry does best" (Poet Hwang In-chan, from the preface).

A dream so recurring, a record of a tragic world

The poems in "Slow Slow" are filled with images of recurring nightmares.
It's summer but it's snowing, and the clock keeps ticking but tomorrow never comes.
Fruit hanging on a tree never ripens.
“Fear, anxiety, and despair strike the keys as they please” (“Cube”).
The world is full of flames.


In which year did people
They set fire to the women's hair
The following year, the women
He set his own hair on fire.

Fire doesn't go out easily
The fire burned the women, and the next year it burned everyone.
But it didn't turn off

People didn't know they were burning to death
He kept setting his own hair on fire.
_ "The World is Burning" section

The fire that started in the women's hair soon spread throughout the world.
“The world is burning and it’s still so cold” (“The World is Burning”).
In “Barter,” too, “the fire of hunger burns unquenchable throughout the winter.”
In “Departure,” too, “Wheat fields and soybean fields, mountains and hills and valleys and seas/ Houses and buildings and factories and hospitals/ Are burning.”


Welcome
People wearing masks stand in line
Go into the tent
The line was long and people waiting were collapsing one by one.

Welcome
Disaster and safety are received alternately

(…)

Welcome
Water dripping from my body
I melt like ice
_ "Goodbye" part

The nightmare returns in another form.
People fall in disaster.
The landscape of the pandemic that has swept through our lives overlaps.
Is this just a disturbing dream that has now passed?
Has the next world begun?
But the poet sees.
People standing in front of a pharmacy with “backs on the verge of tears” (“Nap”), the news that “everyone in the hospital on Earth died in the bombing” (“No Exceptions”), a scene where “people are absentmindedly and mechanically turning the pages of time one by one” (“Waiting Room”), and that “even when a part of the world “disappears,” the world does not disappear” and “what is lost does not return” (“As if Everything Had Ended”).


Nightmare images are repeated and varied, either directly referring to reality or metaphorically.
Even if the person next to you asks what's wrong, or if you hear a voice on the other end of the phone asking if everything is okay, it's hard to open your mouth.
Nothing much happened.
All I can say is that nothing happened.
But how could all this nightmare, all this disaster, be unrelated to us?

A slow gaze that looks honestly

The only thing that keeps this devastating fire from spreading is unceasing prayer.
The poet walks slowly, carrying heavy dark clouds on his head.
I walk and walk, and my feet disappear, so I walk on my knees.
Do not turn away from the place of pain.
When “something like light, something like snow/ falls on a very small person standing in the shadows of an alley,” it seems like a woman, a snowman, not a person.
But “I don’t want to leave you alone/ I keep looking/ I look closely” (“Ghost at the Window”).
Kang Seong-eun's poetry begins with a gaze that does not want to leave the other alone.

The recurring images of nightmares and the language of prayer reveal “a sad mirror that proves the impossibility of changing reality.”
Nevertheless, the beautiful resonance that 『Slow Slow』 leaves behind is because it is based on the honesty and accuracy that Kang Seong-eun's poetry has reached.
In his poetry, dreams are not a fictional device, but a passageway that reveals a reality that the language of reality cannot encompass.
Dreams intervene “to barely perceive the reality we are not aware of” (Poet Hwang In-chan, from the preface).

But no matter how terrible the world may be, I cannot help but call beautiful the hope that we can be together in that world, the attitude of holding on to that heart and not letting go.
How can you not love someone who keeps trying, someone who keeps talking even when they know it won't work, someone who wants to speak even in broken and fragmented language, someone who is willing to be in the misery together?
That is also why we love Kang Seong-eun's poetry and the poet himself with all our heart.

_ Poet Hwang In-chan, excerpt from the preface, “In this endlessly recurring dream”

Poetic hospitality that brings us together

The movement that runs through ‘Slow Slow’ is none other than ‘stop.’
The phrase “listen quietly/stop and then again” in the first poem “A Poem with Sound” teaches us from the beginning how to listen.
The moment you stop what you are doing and listen to the snow falling like a lullaby, poetry allows you to experience a moment of tension and liberation at the same time, like a breath that has been held back and then released.
The final poem, "Snowstorm," depicts cars stopped in the middle of the road.
What becomes even clearer in the scene where everyone stops running is the poetic hospitality that brings us together even in despair and helplessness.
Slowness and pause are not mere pauses.
It is an attitude that allows us to listen to the disappeared beings and absent voices by going back and forth between ‘non-existence’ and ‘existence.’
In that gap, many things that I don't remember are played back.
Forgotten things orbit the orbit of dreams.
The deceased grandmother goes back and forth between rooms.
The world that has disappeared turns into a dot without even realizing that it has disappeared.
In the quiet night when the son-in-law is asleep, for the person who will open this collection of poems, “the song does not disappear but lingers in the mouth” (“Goodbye”), and the next day, “the world before falling asleep/ and the world after opening my eyes/ slowly slide in different directions” (“Nap”).

Surrounded by cars in the middle of the road
I can't see ahead

Everyone was running
Stop

It suddenly occurred to me that dead people don't need cars.
If there's a place to go, it's the job of the living.

Cars that no one is riding in
As if there was somewhere to go

Standing lost
I'm in a blizzard
_ "Snowstorm" specialist

Poet's words

Slow slow
The sound of falling snow

It's summer
What should I do?

Friends who promised to meet when the first snow falls
Don't melt
Don't die
Let's meet here

August 2025
Kang Seong-eun