Don Mee Choi: KAUMKRIEG / Freely Frayed

KAUMKRIEG weaves together the personal and the political in a form of poetry that blends memoir, libretto, collage, archival material and drawings.

Drawing on materials from her father, who worked as a press photographer during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Choi explores memory, heritage and history within the context of the Korean War (1950–1953), the ‘least of all wars’. Poetry and geopolitics thus become inseparable twin sisters.

Freely Frayed, too, navigates the terrain between memory, language and history. The collection brings together early poems, essays and translation notes, revealing the poetic foundations of Choi’s KOR-US trilogy. Her texts examine the political conditions of language and distance, colonial history and identity – and conceive of memory itself as a form of translation.

In conversation with Uljana Wolf and Lotta Thießen, the discussion will centre on translation and transposition, personal memory and geopolitical memory – and on a poetry that forges new connections across languages, times and forms.

Don Mee Choi was born in Seoul (South Korea). She is the author of the KOR-US trilogy: *Mirror Nation* (2024), *DMZ Colony* (2020, National Book Award) and *Hardly War* (2016). She has received fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan and Whiting Foundations, as well as from the DAAD’s Berlin Artists’ Programme, amongst others. She has received numerous awards for her translations of Kim Hyesoon’s poems. She lives and works in Berlin. Uljana Wolf is a poet and translator. Her most recent publications include *muttertask* (2023), *DMZ Kolonie* by Don Mee Choi (2023) and, in collaboration with Sool Park, *Autobiography of Death* by Kim Hyesoon (2025).

Lotta Thießen is a poet and translator from Portuguese and English.

The book launch will take place in English.