Joan Kwon Glass ’98
Current Season Poet
Joan Kwon Glass’ Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms (Perugia Press, 2024) examines the historical weight of the early-20th century Japanese occupation of Korea and the expressions of inherited intergenerational trauma through candid and intimate poems that explore grief, resilience, disordered eating, addiction, and familial suicide. As Glass writes in the opening poem of her collection, “The first Koreans were part god, part beast. / Every morning I look in the mirror and ask: / Which will I be today?” Over the course of these poems, Glass returns to this question, asking how grief can bring a person closer to their most beast-like self or further illuminate the distance between divinity and humanity. Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms makes a compelling argument that both recent and historical grief are non-linear, complex, and often inextricable from each other.
Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms has received numerous honors, including the Paterson Poetry Prize, IPPY Gold Medal for Poetry, and the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry. In a review of the book, author Lizzy Ke Polishan writes: “Like a masterful camera, the collection zooms in and out, sometimes plunging us into the reality of personal embodiment, sometimes pulling back with a wide-angle lens on the contextualizing forces of history, mythology, science.”
In addition to Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, Glass is the author of the critically acclaimed full-length collection Night Swim (Diode Editions, 2022) and two chapbooks: If Rust Can Grow on the Moon (Milk & Cake Press, 2022) and How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy (Small Harbor Publishing, 2022).
Glass’ reading (with janan alexandra) will be followed by a conversation with Rebecca Hart Olander in Weinstein Auditorium in Wright Hall on Tuesday, December 2 at 7 p.m. Free & open to the public. Books will be sold and a signing will follow. Livestream also available on the BDPC YouTube page.