Unexpected Vanilla

By Hyemi Lee

Lee Hyemi's poetry is characterized by fluidity and wetness, with subjects moving about and soaking in each other through curious means.

Unexpected Vanilla's exchange of liquids often involves sex, but intercourse can be nonsexual: drinking tea or alcohol, going to the beach, sitting in the same tub, crying, feeling your lover's sweat on your palm. In this way, Lee explores a wide variety of relationships, attractions, and sensations. Her erotically charged, surrealist sensibility can be traced back to the paintings of Leonor Fini, a bisexual Argentinian artist whom she admires. Lee subverts the titular "vanilla" norm without denying its pleasures.

Detailing various intimacies in her "world of the second person," which still feels clandestine but safe from the threat of exposure, Lee explores the Korean language's scope for ambiguous gendering. The task of the queer translator is to feel out the subtleties with respect, as one does in life, and not presume heterosexuality. Just as Lee spoke out during the 2016 hashtag movement that began calling out sexual violence within South Korean literary circles, her poems recreate and hold space for agency and queerness in female sexuality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tilted Axis Press
• Release date: Aug 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781911284499

Hyemi Lee

Lee Hyemi (b. 1988) is the author of three poetry collections and an essay collection. At eighteen, she was one of the youngest winners of the JoongAng Literary Newcomer’s Prize. Her second collection Unexpected Vanilla was shortlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry and the 2022 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation.

Book preview

The cover of Unexpected Vanilla by Lee Hyemi, translated from Korean by Soje, shows a photograph by artist Okto Lee of a white flower on a pale blue background. The flower is covered in drops of dew.

Contents

Unexpected Vanilla

Summer, When Loquats Light Up

Arriving Lights

World of Breaths

Diver

Banan

Cenote

Polar Night

The Cupboard with Strawberry Jam

A Poppy’s Summer

Droplets Knocking

Palkkumchi

Personal Rain

Taste of Flour

Ardently

Sleeping Waters

Unexpected Vanilla

No Panties

Foreplay with the Horla

Inside the Tower

Half the Blood

A Standstill Order

Under the Shadow of Your Hand

Unrecorded Days

Loss of Light

Trace

Taste of Wings

Just as the Magnolia Doesn’t Know Its Own Limit

Under the Fluttering Red and White Flags

Summer, When I Dreamt of Vines

The Departing Tree

Underwater Jungle

Star, Sick

Untouchable

Flowerantler

A Moment’s Hand

Days of Humidity

Behind the Downpour

Night, like a Print

Pulvis

Sense of Snowflakes

I Saw Your Wife

Odalisque on Thursday

Star of Perfidy

Evening, When My Pet Plant Opens Its Eyes

Flower Basin

A Boil on My Hand

Receiving the Runny Red Gem

The Night Behind the Window

Amok

Sprinkler

Lalala, Cherries

Under Two Layers of Currents

Fish Tank Holding a Sea Robin

Crossing the Black Page of Sleep

Femdom

Sprouting Bones

Use of Green

Erasable Seeds

The Neighborhood

Albino

Someone from the Western Riverside

Water Footprint

Translator's Note

Copyright

About Tilted Axis Press

Landmarks

Cover

Praise For Unexpected Vanilla

Shortlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry

Shortlisted for The Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation 2022

‘With lines like Shall we fill our mouths with cherries and kiss naughtily knottily all night long, Lee Hyemi’s poetry, bewitchingly translated by Soje, makes me shiver with pleasure. To taste Unexpected Vanilla is to take a midnight dip in a deep, dark pool. Thrilling, sexy and subversive, it refuses to give up its secrets easily. I’m obsessed.’ – Shu-Ling Chua, author of Echoes

‘Unexpected Vanilla is a collection filled with female sensuality and wondrous longings. I adore Lee’s adventurous exploration of the mundane – how a weather can be personal, a bunch of grapes in a bowl of water can be an underwater jungle. This collection is diary-like, scattered with understated eroticism. It is also playful and experimental. In Lee’s poetry, there is little distinction between bodies and nature. We are all but fluid breaths – the knots of air,/jumbled and suspended,/deepen and seep into each other. The barriers between language and Language melt away in this masterfully translated work of poetry.’ – Jinhao Xie, as seen in Poetry Foundation, Bitter Melon Press and bath magg

‘In Lee Hyemi’s work, the body is a liquid, mutable, flickering thing. These vulnerable poems shimmer and surge with a yearning for the natural world, transcendence and communion. A fresh and refreshing voice.’ – Remi Graves, author of with your chest

‘A sensuous poetry collection full of mouths licking, parting, kissing, whispering, Lee Hyemi's Unexpected Vanilla shows how delicious the language of desire and intimacy can be. Soje's fantastic translation astutely brings out the wordplay and queer sexuality embedded in the source text.’ – Emily Jungmin Yoon, author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species and Ordinary Misfortunes

‘This is the story of two equal tongue-tips, / of white double flowers laid on lips, says Lee Hyemi, in an exquisite rendition of her voice into English by her translator Soje. Sensual beauty is suffused throughout