Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unexpected Vanilla
    Unexpected Vanilla
    Unexpected Vanilla
    Ebook85 pages29 minutes

    Unexpected Vanilla

    By Hyemi Lee

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTilted Axis Press
    Release dateAug 20, 2020
    ISBN9781911284499
    Unexpected Vanilla
    Author

    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.

    Related to Unexpected Vanilla

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Wild Ride

      Feb 23, 2024

      A Wild Ride
      3 min read

    • Article

      New Literary Magazine Makes Contemporary Japanese Fiction Accessible To English Readers

      Oct 10, 2020

      The literary journal's debut issue translates a plethora of Japanese literature both old and new, and facilitates discussion about the translation itself.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Isabella Hammad

      Sep 15, 2017

      It happened like this. A week after the Six-Day War, Sam walked to the eastern bank of the Jordan River. He was working as a counselor that summer near Karameh, at a day camp for boys. Although the fighting occurred further upstream, camp activities

      16 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Max Porter

      Dec 6, 2019

      I would have been lost this year (as any other) without poetry to cling to and travel with. The post A Year in Reading: Max Porter appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      How High We Go In The Dark

      Dec 29, 2021

      ▸ RELEASED 18 JANUARY 304 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Sequoia Nagamatsu ▸ Publisher Bloomsbury There are surprisingly few SF stories about death. Sure, many books and films kill off characters. But only a handful – like Tarkovsky’s Solaris, or Te

      1 min read

    • Article

      Best Translated Book Awards Names 2020 Longlists

      Apr 1, 2020

      The 35 books on this year's fiction and poetry longlists represent 20 different countries and feature authors writing in 18 languages. The post Best Translated Book Awards Names 2020 Longlists appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems by Rohan Chhetri

      Sep 8, 2020

      All summer the half voice lurked behind me & I played deaf for days for to live To not write about it to use my body Part the river’s flesh to operate Machinery is human too to love & for once stay awake through it all. Now it comes like the deer sle

      3 min read

    • Article

      Queer Identity Cards

      Dec 7, 2021

      Queer Identity Cards
      1 min read

    • Article

      The Cheapness of Luxury

      Jul 18, 2024

      The Cheapness of Luxury
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Jessamine Chan

      Dec 5, 2022

      Jessamine Chan reflects on 2022 through the books she read. The post A Year in Reading: Jessamine Chan appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: C Pam Zhang

      Dec 11, 2019

      It was the last year of my third decade on this earth, and it seems with every passing year I grow increasingly alien to that earth, or it to me. The post A Year in Reading: C Pam Zhang appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Emotion Seller

      Mar 20, 2024

      Justin Kuritzkes hacked his way into the public consciousness with a god-tier viral YouTube video named Potion Seller which, if you haven’t seen it already then put this down and watch it now. He expanded his repertoire of dramatic writing and perfor

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Gina Apostol

      Dec 1, 2021

      When the pandemic began I worked fiercely on finishing a novel I had started but dropped a few years ago—because that’s what I do under stress: I buckle down and write. It’s how I cope. The post A Year in Reading: Gina Apostol appeared first on The M

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Choir of Man: Max Porter’s ‘Lanny’ Wants You to Listen

      Mar 25, 2019

      Porter's second book is an attempt to capture a village, entirely, in language, and it does so by trying to represent the village’s breadth of narrative voices. The post The Choir of Man: Max Porter’s ‘Lanny’ Wants You to Listen appeared first on The

      7 min read

    • Article

      Three’s Company

      Mar 20, 2024

      Three’s Company
      9 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Chantal V. Johnson

      Dec 2, 2022

      Chantal V. Johnson reflects on 2022 through the books she read. The post A Year in Reading: Chantal V. Johnson appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Octavia E. Butler on Mars

      Dec 15, 2021

      Octavia E. Butler on Mars
      5 min read

    • Article

      Adult Fiction

      Nov 6, 2024

      Andromeda. By Therese Bohman. Tr. by Marlaine Delargy. Jan. 2025. 192p. Other, $16.99 (9781635424188); e-book (9781635424195). Sofie, a young intern at a publishing company, has a chance encounter with Gunnar, her boss. He is in his sixties, nearly t

      83 min read

    • Article

      Six Sonnets

      Jan 1, 2021

      Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants somethingfrom me, but, well, everybody wants something and nobody wantsnothing from me, goldenrod, towhead, beast. Goldenrod, you packthe meadows like gold-plated sardines. I have heart palpitationsbu

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Unexpected Vanilla

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Unexpected Vanilla - Hyemi Lee

      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

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1