KAYLEE YOUNG-EUN JEONG
Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong is from Oregon and lives in New York. Her work appears in Shenandoah, The Columbia Review, and Diode Poetry Journal, among others. She loves her parents, her brother, Anne Carson, and her platform shoes.
We can only access what is real through the mediation of language,
but that doesn't mean if you stick a knife through your chest
you're not going to get hurt. What I mean: our bodies
get in the way of our souls all the time.
I am always wary of writing about destruction in a way that smothers that destruction in palatable language. But I do think destruction has its own kind of music, and I try to listen to that music as closely as possible, steering away from dramatizing or diminishing it. I think when something is wholly and unapologetically itself on the page, the relief and clarity of that can feel like beauty.
March 17, 2024