darkly + completely
Min Kang
Childbirth and matrescence (or the process of becoming a mother) obliterated any previous notion I had about my sense of self and the scope of control I thought I had over my life. darkly + completely consists of multiple, exhaustive attempts at understanding my cocoon as I had built it as well as trying to determine the root of my desire to build a predictable, comfortable, but limited life next to the widest interstate in the United States.
I meditate on my inability to resist the overwhelming obsession with productivity in our culture that also eats away at any opportunity to process the disappointments in our lives and the despair within and around us. These essay poems explore the importance of maintaining selfhood outside of work and family but also about the cliche of feeling grateful and indebted to the familial, familiar love for my child who made me a mother and for my partner who had an equal role in building this life. This book navigates and negotiates with the inherently flawed nature of language and attempts to describe the intense, suffocating eclipse of a love that childbirth allowed me to experience.
MIN KANG is the author of Diary of a K-Drama Villain (2015), a book of poems, and her work has been published in Gulf Coast, Asia Literary Review, and elsewhere. She was a semifinalist for the 2021 Gatewood Prize and a finalist for the 2021 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize and the 2022 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is a Kundiman fellow and a graduate of the LSU Creative Writing Program, SFSU Department of Creative Writing, and Texas A&M University. She is currently finishing a memoir-in-essays about surviving abuse and learning to forgive her parents through gentle parenting. She is represented by Jonathan Rosen at the Seymour Agency. She is online at byminkang.com.