Annal:2002 Walt Whitman Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Walt Whitman Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Notes from the Divided Country: Poems
- 2002 Walt Whitman winner
- 2004 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 16.52
In her first collection, Suji Kwock Kim confronts some of the most difficult, most unanswerable questions—colonialism, the Korean War, emigration, racism, love. She considers what a homeland would be, for a divided nation and divided self: what it means to enter language, the body, the family, the community; to be a daughter, sister, lover, citizen or exile.
In settings from New York to San Francisco, Scotland to Seoul, her poems question “what threads hold/our lives together” in cities and gardens, battlefields and small towns. Across the no-man’s-land…
