Cathy Park Hong is one of the most distinctive contemporary voices in American poetry, known for her bold experimentation with language, identity, and culture. Her poems often explore what it means to live between worlds—as a Korean American navigating race, history, and belonging in the United States.
One of her most notable collections, Dance Dance Revolution, uses a hybrid, invented language that mixes global Englishes, slang, and multilingual influences. This unique style reflects the fragmented, globalized world and challenges traditional ideas of “correct” English. It also gives voice to people who are often excluded from mainstream narratives.
 |
| Cathy park hong |
Her later work, such as Engine Empire, takes a more narrative approach, examining themes like colonialism, technology, and power across different historical periods. Through imaginative storytelling, she connects past and present injustices.
In her widely discussed book Minor Feelings, she blends poetry with essay, introducing the concept of “minor feelings”—emotions like shame, suspicion, and invisibility experienced by marginalized people. Although it’s prose, its lyrical and poetic quality deeply connects to her poetic voice.
Overall, Cathy Park Hong’s poetry is fearless, intellectually rich, and emotionally resonant. She pushes readers to rethink language, question identity, and confront uncomfortable truths about race and society, making her work both challenging and deeply rewarding.
Body Builder
I can no longer blush. Half-face towards the starchy scape.
Birds limn the spindle trees, their Listerine-hued eyes dart
as they trill mechanical dirges tabulating not again, not
again / I can no longer blush. The flat arctic sky
boundlessly jogs to another hemisphere / She grows!
Or her pectoral grows or all her pectorals grow / A drop of body
oil the size of a water balloon splooshes down on a man as a graceless
anointing, atomizing into tears / How delicate the sounds are from
her height! Glottal roses wink out of their throats: their voices
tine/ Now I am blushing / Swamp moss draped over the arcades / Oh
she’ll topple. She’s making for the welkin / swamps massage
the plywood foundations of our houses / And speaking of / she shoots
up not like a beanstalk but a city erected quick-time / and speaking
of, I blush blood / Roiling up past 200 ft, dizzy from all that phosphagen / I
be damned where she gits all that nylon, the size of wedding tents!/ She
flexes for her audience / Naugahide. Fuel injection. A sawed-off
shotgun will do you nothing just the rat-a-tat-tat / Rabelaisian
bullhonkies hunker and tinker tents around her / Roiling,
flexing / are louts without a law to bless them / a shadow
overcast / a footstep is a swamp in which gators pop up like whack-
a-mole carnival games / what are they saying? do they marvel?/ I am
hemorrhaging flames! / she aims with her thumb.
Somehow I'm not very comfortable
Such poisonous families
I startle. Alarum, the feudal world.
I plowed the oil rig and plum blossom fields, the fields where they
danced half-ring, the
Aorta mortuary fields. The fields. If not for
The fields here, there are
Animal wanderings.
My father watched he watched
Outside the window he saw he saw
The comet streak klieg-light the setting light the world parcels off
into mindless.
Trees in essence flagrant assonance
I suck back into my mouth.
I am this chair, talking to him,
If the burden is to go back.
The world parcels off into seepage, capillary tea-bags he said, he
said I must work, I said
I had no dreams that night.
But allure the shoe-polished twilight,
Brunt flotilla of stars
This minus store amid the fields,
Amid the blight amid
The cold-ball bearing I yearn,
For you who lastly fueled breathing this air this air.
Ballad in A
A Kansan plays cards, calls Marshall
a crawdad, that barb lands that rascal a slap;
that Kansan jackass scats,
camps back at caballada ranch.
Hangs kack, ax, and camp hat.
Kansan’s nag mad and rants can’t bask,
can’t bacchanal and garland a lass,
can’t at last brag can crack Law’s balls,
Kansan’s cantata rang at that ramada ranch,
Mañana, Kansan snarls, I’ll have an armada
and thwart Law’s brawn,
slam Law a damn mass war path.
Marshall’s a marksman, maps Kansan’s track,
calm as a shaman, sharp as a hawk,
Says: That dastard Kansan’s had
and gnaws lamb fatback.
At dawn, Marshall stalks that ranch,
packs a gat and blasts Kansan’s ass
and Kansan gasps, blasts back.
A flag flaps at half-mast.
They Come
Stamp the earth rind down,
shuck our boots & nap on
rubber cockscomb pad.
Rise up & ride in,
poles poked through with hide of kid
flap from blither wind.
Ride into a town of tires stacked,
a tarred prehistoric castle.
A town of shacks painted kiwi green
latches guano rimmed.
Road’s a batter of blood & dust.
One serf scurries off cowed & cloaked.
Linseed-eyed & broad of face.
Hold, I say.
She says oh gods once nested on our tire hills
but now that tire factory flakes to tinder too.
Are you here from the world above?
Now come. Heal my kin.
Are you here from the world above?
We douse ourselves with flame retardant
& douse the town to flame.
Are you here from the world above?
We hear her death in flames
We hear other deaths in flames
Along each town we pass
We rave & rove & gore
the last oil rig hidalgo in his tin gilt throne,
His ale we drink, his heart we jar.
We are from the world above,
We sing & jig but like Sisyphus,
as we eye from afar,
as each child crawls out their gutted hole,
& rebuild each dead town —
We can never rest.
Year of the Amateur
Recall the frontier when the business
of memory booms, when broadbands uncoil
and clouds swell with sticky portals, amassing
to a monsoon of live-streams.
Burn your chattel to keep the cloud afloat
so its tears can freeze to snow.
The voice flatlines in this season of pulp:
The artist makes miniature churches out of drain pulp,
The Indonesian rainforest is pulped,
the last illuminated gold leaves are pulped so we
gather and watch an otter nom nom
sweet urchin to a pulp.
We laugh softly.
