Phantom Limbs by Lee Min-ha

"The world of Lee Min-ha’s Phantom Limbs is indeed a haunted one, at turns dreamlike and nightmarish as each poem weighs the risks and rewards of being (not quite) human, of having a body (of sorts). Every image veers wildly from expectation, and even the most surreal moments are convincingly rendered and viscerally felt. Lee’s poetry stuns in Jein Han’s beautiful, painstaking translation.” —Paige Aniyah Morris

First published in Korean in 2005, Phantom Limbs is Lee Min-ha’s debut book of poetry. Critically lauded for its visceral imagery and world-building through word-play, this collection of surreal and fabulistic poems reminds readers that poems are spells and incantations.

Lee Min-ha (b. 1967) is a Korean poet based in Seoul. She is the author of six poetry collections, including 『환상수족』 (Phantom Limbs, 2005), 『음악처럼 스캔들처럼』 (Musically Scandalously, 2008), 『모조 숲』 (Imitation Woods, 2012), and 『세상의 모든 비밀』 (All the Secrets of the World, 2015). 『미기후』 (Microclimate, 2021) recieved the Jihun Award and Sanghwa Award, and 『우울과 경청』 (Melancholy and Hearkening, 2025) won the Lee Hyeonggi Award.

Jein Han lives in Seoul and translates between Korean and English. She is currently translating The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson.

PRAISE

“I think of Deleuze’s ‘becoming’ as a male metaphor. Lee Min-ha transcends becoming. In her poetry, a single dot explodes into images. A single scene gives rise to a string of events. A single motion generates a wealth of subsequent gestures. Lee’s language places the poetic object before her gaze and unfurls the object’s world like a large folding fan. Like giving life to a child and immediately rearing it into a giant. Like creating a small sun and having it illuminate an entire continent. The poet, rather than foregrounding herself, smoothes out the folds of the poetic object in front of her. Accordingly, her ears become as large as houses, her eyes as vast as the sea. Lee Min-ha is not a surrealist—she is a poet who has yielded herself to the world of the Other and has expanded her sensory organs to the size of the earth. She is a poet who has surrendered herself to the image, eternal and infinite.” —Kim Hyesoon