Prose from Poetry Magazine
Cindy Juyoung Ok on the Collaborative Process
These poems are drawn from emails originally written by Seong between 2011 and 2013 and then arranged and recreated by Cindy in between 2019 and 2021, one poem using a single email and two splicing together a series of emails. The poems present parenting as a concomitant experience of the movement of the body, trauma of the state, and acceptance of distance. The form centers the concerns, values, and fears of the mother while intimating the contrasting positionality of the daughter as line breaks destabilize and multiply braided meaning in English’s gaps.
Cindy Juyoung Ok writes, translates, and teaches creative writing. She is a reviewer for Harriet Books.
