Man on Extremely Small Island

Book excerpt: Man on extremely small island is a collection of poems in four sections. The sections follows the seasons. The poems in the first section urge a movement outward (a "spring motion"), and are generally exuberant, hopeful, inclusive and comic. This movement swells into the summer of "Open Sky," section II, the most broadly confident poem in the book, typified by the "blue" outro in which the speaker, a "blue monk in a blue train," sails for a transcendent "blue country" filled with a "blue kind." Section III, fall, finds the speaker in a rut, isolated in a closed space (apartment, coffee shop, extremely small island), trapped in a repetitive cycle of days - a "life of facsimile," as "Self-Reproduction with Scream Pillow" puts it. In "Bon Chul Koo and the Hall of Fame," section IV, the speaker is back in his car again but this time with his father; the movement is not forward as in "Open Sky" but backward, as the speaker moves spatially back toward his childhood home in Cleveland (stopping in the culturally backward region of Cooperstown) as well as temporally back through Korean family history and his memories of growing up.