Poetry. Asian Studies. Translated by Won-Chung Kim and Christopher Merrill. The poems of Heeduck Ra are charged with a friction between image and idea, sound and sense. She glimpses an arc, which may light a path from the visible world to the invisible. Her work occupies the ever-shifting border region between what we know and what we do not know, a zone in which to apprehend the world anew. Thus like mystics through the ages, she sees into the life of seemingly mundane things--a white lotus flower, dried fish, a pair of stockings--and discovers essential truths about her life here below. SCALE AND STAIRS is rich in awakenings occasioned by Ra's inspired attention to that which is usually overlooked--a tobacco flower, a tree on a truck, a bowl of cooked rice in soup. Each poem is a new world lit by the imagination of a gifted writer.

Author Hometown: Gwangju KOR