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 is a writer, an editor, and an educator. Her debut poetry collection, Ward Toward, won the 2023 Yale Younger Poets Prize. A MacDowell Fellow, her poems have been published in The Nation, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Ok was a finalist for a 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, has served as a Poetry Foundation Library Forms &...