Invisible Cartographies
by Meg Kim
41 pages. 5.5″ x 7″ September, 2024. $12. NDR.

Winner of the 12th Annual New Delta Review Chapbook Contest.
Selected by Angela Peñaredondo

In Meg Kim’s Invisible Cartographies, we uncover and locate emotional and regional geographies sought out from a “dexterous heart.” Kim intimately and bravely strings the chemical language of diasporic grief, full of so much living “like a tarp stretched wide” with tender luminosity, “iridescent from wounds.” Through poems in symphony with dark and tenebrous ecologies, Kim forages through “foothills” of “the missing,” holding up to the light remnants from war, histories of fugitivity and (un)belongings after such inherited survival. ~ Angela Peñaredondo, author of nature felt but never apprehended

To read Invisible Cartographies is to wade through curious, viscous language, haunted landscapes, dream journals, flooded fragments, reworked folktales, diasporic daughterhood, and what eludes us, each line like a “thunderegg / with a miniature borealis inside.” It demands the reader look with an incisive, deeply felt ache. This is an evocative collection I’ll be returning to again and again, opening that “stone jar in the long-awaited thaw.” ~ Jane Wong, Author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City and How to Not Be Afraid of Everything

With Invisible Cartographies, Kim has rendered the familiar in new, pointed, and shrewd observation. She writes of a “[l]ong violence that dreamt [her] west.” Histories become visible through body and place— the relationship between familial survival, the Korean language, and the speaker’s own longing weaved together with lush description. What Kim has achieved—balancing the urban and the pastoral, the present and the archival—is no small feat. Invisible Cartographies shines in its quiet elegance, like the very pearl for which the author is named. ~ Saba Keramati, author of Self-Mythology

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