Shortlisted for the 2021 National Translation Prize in Poetry

A sensual, surrealist collection by a young feminist poet, in an equally sensuous and sensitive queer translation.

Lee Hyemi’s poetry is characterized by fluidity and wetness, with subjects moving about and soaking in each other through curious means.

Unexpected Vanilla’s exchange of liquids often involves sex, but intercourse can be nonsexual: drinking tea or alcohol, going to the beach, sitting in the same tub, crying, feeling your lover’s sweat on your palm. In this way, Lee explores a wide variety of relationships, attractions, and sensations. Her erotically charged, surrealist sensibility can be traced back to the paintings of Leonor Fini, a bisexual Argentinian artist whom she admires. Lee subverts the titular “vanilla” norm without denying its pleasures.

Detailing various intimacies in her “world of the second person,” which feels clandestine but safe from the threat of exposure, Lee explores the Korean language’s scope for ambiguous gendering. The task of the queer translator is to feel out the subtleties with respect, as one does in life, and not presume heterosexuality. Just as Lee spoke out during the 2016 hashtag movement that began calling out sexual violence within South Korean literary circles, her poems recreate and hold space for agency and queerness in women’s sexuality.

Written by Lee Hyemi, translated from Korean by Soje.

Cover: Photo by Okto Lee. Design by Soraya Gillani Viljoen.

This title first published on 20 August 2020. Please note that this title is not included in the 2020 subscription.

The new edition of Unexpected Vanilla will publish on 29 September 2022 and includes a new translator’s note by Soje, with new cover artwork by Okto Lee and Soraya Gilanni Viljoen. This title is included in the 2022 subscription.