Joan Kwon Glass is a Korean diasporic poet, winner of the 2024 Perugia Press Poetry Prize for her book DAUGHTER OF THREE GONE KINGDOMS and NIGHT SWIM, winner of the Diode Book Prize. Joan’s poems have been featured or are forthcoming in POETRY, The Slowdown, Passages North, Poetry Daily, Terrain, Ninth Letter, Rattle, AAWW (The Margins), Poetry Northwest, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander and elsewhere. She lives and teaches near New Haven, CT.
IG: joan_kwon_glass
Twitter: joanpglass
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Books with links:
Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms
Night Swim
If Rust Can Grow on the Moon
How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy
Hello Joan, Thank you so much for sharing your work with us and for answering my questions about this truly beautiful and moving book, Three Daughters of Three Gone Kingdoms. I'm delighted by the unusual language, dark humor, and visceral truths that come through, page after page. I urge our readers to get the book! You are the second Perugia Press winning writer we have interviewed and clearly, they choose very talented poets. Let’s get into it:
Joanell Serra: You have many ample images of bodies of water in your poetry, such as:
I wander the beaches beyond which pearl divers hold their breath
submerge in the Pacific, then sell or eat what they find
to keep their families alive.
I am interested in whether it feels tied into your family's history in a way that makes it inevitable? Or do you have other thoughts on how persistent this theme is in the work?
Joan Kwon Glass: Rivers, lakes, and oceans have consistently represented transition and lineage in my life. In Michigan, the lakes offered a backdrop for many of my childhood memories–”up north” (in Michigan’s upper peninsula) as well as the small lakes that served as a backdrop for the neighborhoods where I played, lived, and grieved. In Korea, the Yellow Sea represents the metaphorical and political distance between North and South Korea, as North Koreans will sometimes attempt to defect by swimming across the Yellow Sea. Coastal towns also have significance to Korea. Before and during the Korean War, for example, my own family traveled as far south as possible to escape. They ended up in Pusan, a fishing town, now a major port. Jeju Island is an island with a history of colonial resistance. Near Jeju Island is an island called Ieodo which is still contested by China as belonging to them. There are folk songs written about Ieodo which convey the longing that Koreans have for “home.” For colonized and divided countries, developing a sense of home can be…complicated. It can require mourning, imagination, and world-building. Now, I live in a coastal Connecticut town. There is a beach and state park nearby where egrets feed and breed. Egrets always remind me of the rivers and rice paddies I would pass while on a train from Seoul to my family’s hometown of Daegu. There are so many patterns like this related to water in my life.
Joanell Serra: The book takes the reader on a long autobiographical journey. We meet you as a child, raised by your mother alone after your father left the family. Later, we meet the narrator as an adult, as a mother, as a grieving sister and aunt, and as someone who is on her own healing journey. I imagine much happened in your twenties and maybe thirties that is not included, yet informs so much of the work. How did you decide what portions of your life to focus on for this work?
Joan Kwon Glass: I feel like my current life truly began in recovery from active addiction. I got clean and sober when I was 38 years old. My childhood was one life. I cover that pretty extensively in my book. My 20s and 20s were another. In most of my 20s and 30s, I had what most people would call a relatively normal, successful life. I earned my Master’s when I was 21 and my first teaching job a month later. I married at 26 and had two children. I became a school administrator at age 27. My house literally had a white picket fence around it. When I had a dental procedure and was prescribed an opiate at age 30, the darkest part of my life began. I was immediately addicted and spent the next eight years in active addiction. lost everything that I had except my life. I wrote a chapbook entirely about this entitled IF RUST CAN GROW ON THE MOON (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). Then in 2017, I lost my sister and nephew to suicide. Soon after, I wrote NIGHT SWIM (Diode Editions, 2022) which is entirely about that experience. DAUGHTER OF THREE GONE KINGDOMS feels like an all-encompassing collection about how hunger, longing, grief, memory and diaspora are connected and how they have affected every aspect of my life. I do not believe in avoiding darkness in my work. At the same time, I do not set out specifically to reveal darkness. I write what I am compelled to write.
Joanell Serra: How do you see the interplay of grief and joy in your work? Do you find yourself editing poems that feel too light? Too dark? Are there poets that you read often for evidence of either?
Joan Kwon Glass: I have learned that joy can, and often does, accompany grief. It is one of the absurdities of life and death. I think some of my poems address this implicitly through dark humor and by revealing the contradictions. I have found love, life, and grief to always throw curveballs, so I am a fan of unexpected turns and endings. I’m not sure that I’ve ever thought that one of my poems was “too light!” In fact, at the end of readings, I often joke that I will be ending on a “light poem,” but then say “oh, wait. I don’t have any light poems.” I think I have only ever written one poem that a friend described as “too dark.” It was at a time in my life when I was struggling with one of my own children struggling with me. I felt a lot of despair at that time. I love to read Diane Seuss who doesn’t shy away from the absurdity of life and death and what it means to allow oneself to be fully human, in its ugliness, abstractions, and contradictions. Other poets who convey both grief and joy in a way that resonates with me include Patrick Rosal, Andrea Gibson, and Chen Chen. Specifically for grief (various kinds) I read Eugenia Leigh, Rachel McKibbens, Seamus Fey, Tiana Clark, and K. Iver. For joy, Kai Coggin.
Joanell Serra: The book offers the readers many moments either in Korea or touching on Korean culture. You made the choice not to translate certain words, and to leave the words in Korean instead. Can you speak to this choice and whether that has been challenging? You also included, in speaking of your paternal grandfather, a slang word used towards Koreans. Was this a difficult choice?
Joan Kwon Glass: I have been asked this question before and I wish I had a more poetic answer! The truth is that some of the time, I followed what my instincts told me in terms of the importance of using Hangul. At other times, it was a practical decision–I remembered how to spell that particular word! All of the hungry ghost poems incorporate Hanja (a sort of Mandarin-Korean hybrid alphabet used in official documents and newspapers), because the names of these Buddhist hungry ghosts were first written about when Hanja was used more predominantly.
In terms of my grandfather and using anti-Asian slang, I figured that if I was expected to hear that as a child, I was going to include it. I believe that poetry does not have to be comfortable for the reader or the writer. In fact, I have written some of what I consider to be my most distinctive poems by refusing to turn away from the things that compelled me to start writing. I wrote as a child as the only act of resistance that was accessible to me in an incredibly dysfunctional and traumatic situation. Why would I abandon this now?
Joanell Serra: There is a such a strong theme of faith: from a childhood in an evangelical church, to praying in the depths of drug use to a conversation with your daughter about prayer when she asks:
How do I even know if he is listening?
Do you find your faith, or your struggles with faith, inform your work? Or would you say the work opens up this area because of your own ambivalence or doubts?
Joan Kwon Glass:I think it’s important to point out distinctions between religion, faith & fanaticism. I grew up in a southern Baptist church. The kind of church that actively campaigns against other religions, preaches intolerance as essential to being a “real” Christian, shows video simulations to children of what will happen to them (think gallows, firing squads, etc.) if they are “left behind” during the tribulation, etc. Where I now live, in Connecticut, I very rarely meet religious fanatics. In fact, when I talk about my experiences as a child, the vast majority of people look at me strangely, or as though they think I must be exaggerating. Most folks in New England are either religious, agnostic, or atheist. Then there’s faith–I could write a book about what this means to me, what it has meant to me, and what I hope it can and will mean to me. I am a recovering addict and participate in a 12-step program where we are encouraged to develop our own concept of a “higher power.” My HP shifts and morphs. My faith is always a work in progress. As am I. I WOULD say that my mother’s faith & her fanaticism have deeply affected my outlook on the world and my resistance to any singular way of understanding “God” and that there is any singular “right” way to live my life. So, in this way, her faith and fanaticism have provided me a way into my own spirituality and self-understanding.