Yoo Heekyung is an acclaimed younger South Korean poet, playwright, and essayist who also runs Wit N Cynical, a popular poetry bookstore and project space in Seoul. Yoo writes poems that invite readers to reflect upon daily sorrows, while also illuminating single moments full of strange and arresting images that suggest the passage of time—a hardened piece of bread, a train about to arrive, a crumpled piece of paper. This debut collection in English chronicles contemporary life in a minor key where loneliness and existential ghosts thread the pieces. But Yoo's title also points to his fascination with language, and how each day offers chances to understand new vocabularies and new meanings—of words, of living.

Born in 1980, Yoo is the author of several collections of poetry and prose that query subjects such as photography, poetry, stories, presence and absence, and clouds. His publications include the essay collection Poetry and Photography (Achimdal Books, 2024) and the poetry collection Winter Night Rabbit Worries (Hyundae Munhak, 2023). Yoo is a recipient of Today’s Young Artist Award (2023) from the South Korean Ministry of Culture, the Hyundae Munhak Literary Award (Contemporary Literature Award, 2020), and the Gosan New Writer Award (2019). He studied poetry under Kim Hyesoon (Autobiography of Death, trans. by Don Mee Choi), who has provided a blurb for the book, as have Sawako Nakayasu and Joyelle McSweeney.

Stine An is a poet and translator based in New York City. She received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and an NEA Translation Fellowship for her translations of Yoo Heekyung. Her work has appeared in Best Literary Translations 2024, Best American Experimental Writing 2018, Words Without Borders, Poem-a-Day, World Literature Today, Poetry Daily, Asymptote, The Southern Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and a BA in Literature from Harvard College. Her debut poetry collection, B-Dragon Suite, is a winner of the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize.

More information about Yoo Heekyung can be found here. More information about Stine An can be found here.

Today's Morning Vocabulary

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Check out this video for more information about Yoo and his store Wit N Cynical.

Praise for Today's Morning Vocabulary:

"The importance of An’s role as translator in conveying these complicated, nuanced and surreal struggles from Korean into English cannot be overstated. [...] As Yoo strives to capture the jibe-and-tack of a consciousness attuned to the bizarre nesting within language and the mundane, An works hard to preserve and to serve the poet’s design."

— Eric Baker, Painted Bride Quarterly

"If we tilt our ears to the sound of Yoo Heekyung’s Today’s Morning Vocabulary, we are sure to hear its crying. But what’s more is that we are sure to leave with a vocabulary fit to survive our own mourning."

— Joshua Thermidor, Action Books Microreviews

Yoo Heekyung writes poems that alchemize the weight of the world into nocturnes of ravishing melancholy. The poems are ferocious, tender and impossibly elegiac. The weather is heavy, but the poems abound with multidirectional love for this cast of multitudes. On top of that you also have, crouched inside like explosive pearls, trenchant critique. High praise is also due for the tremendous dexterity of translator Stine An, who wraps her arms around the wild edges of Yoo’s distinct poetic voice, like giving a hug to the rain while growing an umbrella. — Sawako Nakayasu

Yoo Heekyung’s poems are less like photographs than like photography itself, an unlikely collaboration between fluids, silver, paper pulp, things and their traces, shadow and light. By this poetic process the momentary twins for eternity, an eternity paradoxically developed by a brief soak in the human bath. Translator and poet Stine An is the latest collaborator in Yoo’s photographic process, allowing English-language readers to recognize both Yoo’s absurd and humane ingenuity and his location along the lyric coordinates of Yi Sang, Frank O’Hara, Kim Hyesoon, Georg Trakl, Tomaž Šalamun, and others. Today’s Morning Vocabulary is an elixir, an invaluable tonic.
— Joyelle McSweeney

The poems of Yoo Heekyung are a beautiful resistance against time; they are landscapes painted with vestiges of sorrow. Reading his work, we begin to understand Yoo’s insistence that “tragedy demands courage.” His poetry is a canvas of light with endless folds. Our work as readers is to hold onto this light, letting its canvas unfurl into the stretches of space and time. Yoo’s poems require meticulous attention and readers must smooth out the furrows of their hearts to align with his to absorb the precise beauty of language. Scenes from the past he conceals within vanished light are resurrected as present-day losses. Because of this, his landscapes betray the very notion of a landscape. With a casual demeanor, he calms his entire being, like death, to arrange objects and people beneath the light of his poetry—but, in the end, readers will drown in the breathtakingly sad and beautiful ravines of light. — Kim Hyesoon

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