Joan Kwon Glass is not running from death.
She keeps death close enough to give him the side-eye, but not to smell his cologne, as she writes in Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms. The poems in the collection serve as an accounting for the dead, across centuries and continents. They give a family history of generations chained together by trauma and liberated by myth.
Published in 2024, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms records lineages broken by colonization and fogged by language barriers. Glass dwells in myth and childhood memory. She speaks to the dead.
Glass begins her family history on Mt. Taebaeksan, where the god 환웅 touched down from heaven and sired the first human with the bear-woman he fell in love with. This ancient myth contains the first of the many contradictions which preoccupy the poet:
The first Koreans were part god, part
beast. Every morning I look in the mirror
and ask: Which will I be today?
Glass tracks this beast through the Japanese occupation of Korea. In 1950, her grandmother fled the brutalities and humiliations of occupation with her three young children, among them Glass’s mother. Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms studies how war expunges history, interrupting legacies of blood and name.
Language, too, is lost in the diaspora; Korean, Glass’s second language, rusts in her mouth from disuse. To communicate with her grandmother, she can draw on only a few phrases:
that hurts/ may I
please have strawberries/ I don’t understand
Age takes the rest. Glass writes of the erosion of her grandmother’s memories—her own, and the memories they shared. What was the song her grandmother taught her as a child? Something about butterflies and spring, and longing. Because she cannot remember the song, Glass has written this collection.
“These are poems of longing and grief,” she said. “Longing and grief and desire—they don’t feel that different to me.”
Glass has much to grieve. Her sister and her nephew—whose suicides, only months apart, formed the hole at the center of her 2022 collection Night Swim—exert their absence in the pages of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms. Her father began exerting his absence while he was still alive by abandoning Glass and her immigrant mother when Glass was a child.
“I tried for a really long time to have a relationship with my dad,” Glass said. “I can love him without him being in my life.”
They’ve been out of contact for the last eight years. In the poem “When My Mother Asks Me If My Father Is Still Alive,” Glass wonders:
How would grieving his death
be different from grieving his absence?
Glass’s relationships with the dead—and gone, like her father—continue to evolve, like relationships with the living. In the pages of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, she updates the dead, questions them, and refutes their final wishes, writing to her sister, I adorn your body with every piece of jewelry you own instead of saving it for your daughter like you ask.
Her ongoing dialogue with the dead adapts the Korean tradition of ancestor worship, although she writes, no one has time to take care of our ancestors anymore, including me.
Other creatures haunt Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, too. Eleven poems in the collection reference the hungry ghosts, figures from ancient Buddhist myth whose sins on earth are punished by an everlasting, insatiable hunger.
In some tales, when the hungry ghost lifts food to his mouth, the food bursts into flame so he cannot consume it. Glass’s hungry ghosts eat marigolds, eat wind, eat grief. Their hunger illuminates Glass’s hunger, reflecting her long struggle with disordered eating (how many calories/ are there in a flower?).
Glass does not believe that pain is holy, or that it begets art. “I write ugly poems,” she said. “I’m confronting ugly things, and they come out beautifully because language is beautiful.” Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms beautifully confronts the ugliness of racism, generational trauma, and addiction.
The collection records Glass’s antagonism towards Death and other forms of hypocrisy. Since she was a child, writing has been her way “to make a path through a life that didn’t make a lot of sense.” But, in this collection, Glass reaches beyond understanding towards something more complicated, more gorgeous. She writes:
Look, maybe I don’t need to know how it happened.
Maybe one day, I just walked out
of the house, exhausted by gravity.
And a whole galaxy found her way home.
Joan Kwon Glass' Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms is now out from Perugia Press. The photograph at the top is credit to Laura St. John Photography, which is based in Milford.