About
Hyejung Kook’s poetry has appeared in Poem-a-Day, POETRY Magazine, the Denver Quarterly, Memorious, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Hyejung was born in Seoul, Korea, grew up in Pennsylvania, and now lives in Prairie Village, Kansas with her husband and their two young children. She holds a B.A. from Harvard University and an M.F.A. from New York University. As a Fulbright grantee, she spent a year teaching English at Bongmyeong Middle School in Cheongju, Korea. She is co-editor of Barahm Press. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Once is Not Enough, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in Fall 2027.
Featured Work
Dead Reckoning
"Dead Reckoning" appeared on Poem-a-Day (Academy of American Poets) on October 16, 2024.
https://poets.org/poem/dead-reckoning
“Learning about dead reckoning, a navigation technique used to estimate one’s position at sea, I was struck by how perfect a metaphor it seemed to be for grief—the struggle to find one’s bearings, the ungrounded relativity of everything after someone dies. This poem began as a long sequence but arrived at this stripped-down form after fifteen years of off-and-on revision. It felt right [for it] to be nearly imageless, with the exception of ‘airy thinness,’ which comes from John Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.’”
Other Works
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"Spring Coronal" in POETRY Magazine
2021
