Shortlisted, 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry
Shortlisted, 2022 Sarah Maguire Prize
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 still 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.
Read excerpts in Asymptote, Korean Literature Now, Words Without Borders.
Check out this conversation between Soje and Lee Hyemi in Words Without Borders, and this interview with Soje in Asymptote.
PRAISE
“In Lee Hyemi’s work, the body is a liquid, mutable, flickering thing. These vulnerable poems shimmer and surge with a yearning for the natural world, transcendence and communion. A fresh and refreshing voice.” — Remi Graves, author of with your chest
“Unexpected Vanilla is a collection filled with female sensuality and wondrous longings. I adore Lee’s adventurous exploration of the mundane – how a weather can be personal, a bunch of grapes in a bowl of water can be an underwater jungle. This collection is diary-like, scattered with understated eroticism. It is also playful and experimental. In Lee’s poetry, there is little distinction between bodies and nature. We are all but fluid breaths – ‘the knots of air,/jumbled and suspended,/deepen and seep into each other.’ The barriers between language and Language melt away in this masterfully translated work of poetry.” — Jinhao Xie, as seen in Poetry Foundation, Bitter Melon Press and bath magg
“A sensuous poetry collection full of mouths licking, parting, kissing, whispering, Lee Hyemi's Unexpected Vanilla shows how delicious the language of desire and intimacy can be. Soje's fantastic translation astutely brings out the wordplay and queer sexuality embedded in the source text.” — Emily Jungmin Yoon, author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species and Ordinary Misfortunes
“Soje’s translation of Lee Hyemi deftly weaves soft universes of intimacy, and the reader is gifted with delight. A book that stays with you as inner warmth – a lesson in tenderness and in environs of gentle, unpredictable wonder.” Khairani Barokka, author of Ultimatum Orangutan
“In this book, a comma, a line break or a period are like cat doors that lead us to worlds of the strange. Brilliant, remarkable and fun in its play on images and structures, this book is truly unputdownable.” – Norman Erikson Pasaribu, author of Happy Stories, Mostly
“‘This is the story of two equal tongue-tips, / of white double flowers laid on lips’ says Lee Hyemi, in an exquisite rendition of her voice into English by her translator Soje. Sensual beauty is suffused throughout Unexpected Vanilla, and its record of desires melt boundaries of flesh and soul. Here, the poet and her translator match their tongue-tips, and flowers emerge from their lips.” — Jack Jung, co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works
“With lines like ‘Shall we fill our mouths with cherries and kiss naughtily knottily all night long’, Lee Hyemi’s poetry, bewitchingly translated by Soje, makes me shiver with pleasure. To taste Unexpected Vanilla is to take a midnight dip in a deep, dark pool. Thrilling, sexy and subversive, it refuses to give up its secrets easily. I’m obsessed.” — Shu-Ling Chua, author of Echoes
“I think of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla, in translation by Soje, as a kind of hydration after the extended hangover of this year. The poems, which have been called surrealist and sensual, are what I’ve been turning to when feeling life-parched by the constant interventions in intimacy produced by screens and masks, as well as those greater interventions produced and reproduced by gender binaries and heteropatriarchy.” – Kaitlin Rees, AJAR Press
“Lee’s poetry is a revelry in writing in and of a state of pre-position and ‘until-ness.’” – Liam Bishop, Hong Kong Review of Books
“Unexpected Vanilla challenges patriarchal and heteronormative power structures not only through its subject matter, but also by offering an aesthetic that threatens to dismantle any and all hierarchy, even the hierarchy between a metaphor’s vehicle and tenor.” – Jae Kim, Kenyon Review
“Beautifully rendered by Soje, there is a tenderness to Lee Hyemi's writing that feels both vulnerable and dangerous.” – Jeremy Tiang, Nikkei Asian Review
“In this lush, sensual translation by Soje, the collection’s ‘special appetite for impermanent things’ comes to the fore, operating on an unstable, sticky, dream-like logic.” – Joanna Lee, Modern Poetry in Translation
One of “18 Hotly Anticipated Summer Reads”, Paperback Paris
MORE INFORMATION
Publication date: 20 August 2020; second edition: 29 September 2022
Format: B-format paperback (198mm × 129mm)
Extent: 84 pp
ISBNs: 978-1-911284-50-5 (print) / 978-1-911284-49-9 (ebook)
Rights held: World English
Photo by Okto Lee. Cover design by Soraya Gilanni Viljoen.