This debut book of poetry treats translation as play, performance, and embodied sound. Across seven interlinked sections, Stine An stages a fabulated K-pop universe, complete with boy band LIL BANG and girl group The Pink Blossoms, alongside lyric poems and prose meditations that code-switch between Korean and English. The book situates K-pop as both pleasure engine and cultural archive, asking how language survives colonial history, migration, and spectacle without resolving into easy consumption.
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Chris J. Lee is an assistant professor of Queer Studies at Emerson College. Their scholarship is situated at the intersection of Asian American and trans/queer studies, exploring the political and cultural terrain of intraethnic transantagonism and harm. Their writing has been published in Amerasia Journal, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, the Baffler, and The New Inquiry.
Stine An is a poet, translator, and performer based in New York City. She holds a BA in Literature from Harvard and an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown, and has received fellowships and grants from The Poetry Project, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, Yaddo, ALTA, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her publications include Todayβs Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (2025), Winter Night Rabbit Worries by Yoo Heekyung (2026), S_MMER CR_SH (2025), and Comet & Star written by Lee Juck and illustrated by Lee Jinhee (2024). Her debut poetry collection, B-Dragon Suite (2026), won the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize.