Sand Bookshop Raining Sand

Moon Boyoung is a South Korean poet who has published three collections of poetry, including Pillar of Books, for which she received the Kim Soo Young Prize. She has since published several volumes of fiction and essays; beyond print, she distributes her writing through other media-snail mail, radio, phone, and more. She received her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan and is a former International Writing Program resident. Jack Saebyok Jung is a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow and the author of Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus. A Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he co-translated Yi Sang: Selected Works, winner of the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work. His most recent book of translation is Kim Hyesoon's Lady No. He teaches at Davidson College. Hedgie Choi is a poet, fiction writer, and translator who received her MFA in poetry from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin and her MFA in fiction from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Her poetry collection, Salvage, was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award and is a finalist for the John Leonard Prize; it was also named one of the best poetry collections of 2025 by the New York Times. She is the translator of Moon Boyoung's Pillar of Books and co-translator of Kim Yideum's Hysteria, which won the National Translation Award and the Lucien Stryk Prize. She lives in Chicago.

Translators' Warning Author's Note Part 1 Heat Tree Danger Ball Burst Any Second Understanding Adaptation Re-cognition Hope Loss Resident In Heaven Nobody Wakes You Up So You Have to Wake Yourself Up Swimming Pool for Disposing People Everyone Was Wearing an Antelope Hat Part 2 I'm Kept by Me A Hundred Thousand Feelings Bathroom God Sand Bookshop Raining Sand New Breathing Technique The Birth of a Friend Cashier The Jungle and the Trap The Bottle of Just Then Morlokohu's Book Side Theater Part 3 Poet's Note Deformer The Sharp Nosed The Birth of a Friend People Who Use Roads Jason A Plentiful Life Boxes The Law of Burn Ointment Poem of the Severed Hand Unexpected Book Found in the Sand Field The Difficulty of Going on Living The Difficulty of Going on Living Maiden Voyage Part 4 Tangerine At the Crosswalk Drawing a Weary Human Night Vision Story of a Curved Road Installation Artist Olivia Ferreira: Every Morning When I Open My Eyes I Don't Feel Good Cleaning Without Ambition In Case of Emergency, Break Glass with Hammer Saving the World Slowly If You Don't Know Something, Go to the Airport Part 5 Passing LACKING WENT A BIT FURTHER THAN YESTERDAY BEARD DISSOCIATION RESPONSE TO A FRIGHTENING SITUATION THEY'VE GOT A HEART, TOO, NO DOUBT DIFFICULTY IN VISITING THIS LOOPY PLACE DESIRE TO OVERCOME A WOUND LACKING, PASSING Translator's Afterword

"A translation of a translation? A pseudo-translation? A translation with no original? Conceptually, Boyoung's Sand Bookshop Raining Sand is wildly fascinating. And yet even without this innovative framing, her poems are filled with surprising and shattering narratives, strange characters who are all too alive, and worlds inside of worlds that are always moving us into spaces of hilarity and pain and confusion and devious drama. Choi and Jung have done some masterful translating here. Together, the writer and translators expand our conception of what's possible." - Daniel Borzutzky, judge, Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation