“The octopus from Kim’s reading came back to me, and I thought, yes, that’s the perfect image for how her writing sensitively bodies forth, probing and reporting with an ancient intelligence and imagination, submerged in all time. Throughout The Closing Petal at Night, there are octopus-like transformations, with sudden shifts in scale and pace—broad views, next to intimate observations, and thematically, it is multi-tentacled, but everything, attached to the body.

What’s most striking to me here is how she posits the contemporary and personal within ancient and cosmic patterns. By doing this, she indirectly uncovers the relationships between identity and ancestry, history and myth, humans and the cosmos, and shows how the powers that be have always been. The objective tone gives the writing authority; it’s both intimate and at times, oracular. More than once, she seems to be starting over, trying to find a better, non-heroic way forward, as she says—'I wrote away from glory.’

She has built a complex and mysterious world here, simmering with ecstatic insights and emotion.”

— Denise Newman, author of FUTURE PEOPLE, THE NEW MAKE BELIEVE, WILD GOODS, & HUMAN FOREST

“In the poem 'component parts', Kim writes: 'I believe the mouth is a portal",' and indeed, here, in her magnificent book, we the reader are transported through her language to myriad worlds and solar systems where meaning circles potent symbols.

One of The Closing Petal at Night’s potent symbols, a place where this work circles and returns to, is the superficiality and decrepitness of suburban American consumerism in late stage capitalism. In this book there are mortgages and malls and mansions and suburbs and cereal and future homeowners and credit lines and neighbors and beloved dogs and carpet and sad pills and sprawl and marketing and grocery stores and dry cleaners and ugly deals and beeping machines--all of it is tinged with darkness and failure, with this hint that these cheaply made, cheaply bought, easily destroyed things are toxic froth that the speaker of these poems must bat away and wade through in order to survive.

Reading just the scripture poems, ...I feel that she is curating holy text for us that deliberately questions the reality in which we live--is there no other, better, more strange, more real world?”

— Rita Bullwinkel, author of BELLY UP

“Frantz Fanon talks about how the shaping of our lives and of power is composed of bios and mythos, or our lived experiences and how we assign names to them…The Closing Petal at Night is invested in the toggle between the stories told by those in power and the ways stories are configured by the disenfranchised…What if the way we story, fight for language, is mired in the murkiness of power? TCPAN asks big and complicated questions, unwilling to default to narratives of reclamation of identity because what is there to reclaim? What is an origin if that has already been dubbed by someone more powerful? I sense these questions emanating so loudly, the heart of this work pulsating with clarity.”

— Muriel Leung, Author of BONE CONFETTI and IMAGINE US, THE SWARM

~

“I’m attached to the concept ‘from nothing, nothing comes,’ but of course an alternate translation and the more Lucretian development of that ancient cosmology would be ‘from nothing, nothing becomes’. In Mihee Kim's poems, out of what is small or cursed or dormant comes not what is grown directly from, or fully reflective of a negative space, but transformation itself.

Susan Howe writes that "the gaps and silences are where you find yourself…The stutter is the plot... a sounding of uncertainty. What is silenced or not quite silenced. All the broken dreams." Kim's poems tease space from history and the personal for the stutter, the silence; its rapture and so much more."

— Trisha Low, author of THE COMPLEAT PLURGE, SOCIALIST REALISM