Sand Bookshop Raining Sand

Sand Bookshop Raining Sand Synopsis

More real than dreams and more dreamlike than reality, the poems in Moon Boyoung's Sand Bookshop Raining Sand are dry, funny, surprising, and a joy to read. Boyoung infuses ordinary life with surrealist magic, building imaginary worlds from unexpected premises, then pushing them past their logical extreme.

This English-language translation by Jack Saebyok Jung and Hedgie Choi introduces new readers to the work of one of the most remarkable South Korean poets writing today. A tree that you hug for heat, a pool too awe-inspiring to swim in, a bookstore where it rains sand-across such scenes the poet questions how memory and identity change with every passing second.

A central feature is the book's playful uncertainty about authorship and translation-sometimes presenting itself as already "in translation" from imaginary writers, or from imaginary texts by real people. The result is a multilevel investigation of framing, perspective, understanding, and what, precisely, is an "original."

"Einstein
worried that if he ran at the speed of light holding a mirror
the light that started from his face
wouldn't reach the mirror
and his face would disappear from it."
-Excerpt from "I'm Kept by Me"