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A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue

Publication Date: March 2023

Description

These poems luxuriate on elegance in a way that feels entirely necessary, the way Garbo’s eyes lit up the Great Depression or Julie London’s voice puts you in the moods to open your flower. Kwon’s casually gorgeous lines are the best thing since melted butter.

—D.A. POWELL, author of Useless Landscape, Or a Guide for Boys

Praise

I’m in love with the voice of these poems—a witty, sly, sad, generous heart that lives deeply in this world and yet mobilizes language with the freedom and ease of dreams…
—RACHEL HINTON, author of Hospice Plastics

There are poems who know the names of trees, poets who don’t, and now Christine Kwon, a poet who does know the tree’s name, but who pretends not to, only sharing with her readers the incredible privacy of knowing.
—SOPHIA DAHLIN, author of Natch

Christine Kwon has a playfully no-nonsense way with the agitations of being someone’s child, someone’s partner, someone’s poet, someone’s self. “These people inside me/ make me nervous,” she writes, as her poems briskly and brazenly bear the tumults of inwardness. Kwon suffers no fools, but she does suffer—grief-stricken, defiant and turning to poetry for a salvation she can’t quite trust. This voice is fresh, freshly wounded, clear-eyed, laid bare: “They say when you cut into night/ There is no fat/ Only bone.”
—MARK LEVINE, author of Debt

About the Author

© Cooper Lewis

Christine Kwon

Christine Kwon is a Korean American poet and fiction writer. Her debut poetry collection, A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue, won the Cowles Poetry Book Prize (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2023). Her work has appeared in The Poetry Project, Joyland Magazine, Copper Nickel, and The Harvard Advocate, among other places. She lives in New Orleans, where she teaches and serves as the literary editor of Tilted House Press.

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