Glory Hole

A ground-breaking new collection of queer poetry from a leading contemporary Korean poet. Kim Hyun's Glory Hole is the first Korean queer poetry collection.

Featuring gay teens, elders, cats, caterpillars, robots, and other unexpected characters, Kim's fifty-one eccentric poems trace themes of love, sexual desire, abandonment, destitution, and death.

In recounting the splendid yet tragic journeys of his speakers, Kim defies meaningful sense-making.

His poems are a mishmash of dystopian sci-fi and pornography, storytelling and poetry, fictive references, and real figures.

They are not embellished with elegant imagery; in fact, they are antithetical to it, opting instead for incoherent tense, unidiomatic expressions, and never-ending puns.

After all, like LGBTQ+ people in many cultures, Korean queers live in this site of violence.

Bewilderment, deliberately, is Kim Hyun's form. Glory Hole invites readers into a very queer world.