Glass, Joan Kwon: Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms

Perugia Press, paperback

Publication Date: September 24, 2024

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Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms is part lamentation and part hymn—an illumination of diasporic hungers, hauntings, absence, and resilience. With echoes of the thirty-six hungry ghosts in Korean Buddhism running through the text, Joan Kwon Glass’s collection travels from the early twentieth century Japanese occupation of Korea to the landscapes of 1980s suburban Detroit, from Jeju Island’s caves and the DMZ to Connecticut’s shoreline, and from the winter Olympics in Pyeongchang to the pews of midwestern churches. Cast across continents and centuries, matrilineage and inherited silences, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms explores colonialism and “postcolonialism” through disordered eating, suicide loss, religious damage, familial estrangement, addiction, motherhood, and recovery. These poems ask urgent questions: What does it mean to be a mixed-race survivor of generational traumas in a world that often insists on binaries and singular narratives? What role does “hunger” play in navigating life in the diaspora? And, ultimately, what is required to raise an American daughter while forging a path forward?

“‘How many calories / are there in a flower?’ one poem asks in Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, and indeed, the hungry ghost is our guide, and the ‘familiar hum’ of hunger itself, in all its iterations, is the book’s bracketing experience of embodiment and emotion. Glass interweaves pre-colonial Korean and ancestral history with family and personal history, lifting the lid off generational desertion and disconnection, addiction, racism, imposed shame, and unbearable (but borne) grief. ‘The first Koreans were part god, part beast,’ she writes. ‘Every morning I look in the mirror and ask: / which will I be today?’ The answer, in this delicate, sprawling, funny, wounded, ferocious collection, is both/and, and it is the beast that is the key to her improbable survival, the beast, who ‘closed my lips around the priest’s finger, let him / feel my hot tongue against his skin.’ I love the transgressive energy of these poems, the keen bullshit-detector, the willingness to tell the reader exactly what’s up, to enact the truth that our experience of absence can confer on us a kind of royalty, and if we’re lucky, poems like these.” — Diane Seuss

“Joan Kwon Glass’s Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms sweeps across continents and generations, capturing the memories of a grandmother growing up in Korea under Japanese occupation, tracing tendrils to the speaker’s mother, daughter, and a sister gone by suicide after the sudden death of the sister’s son. As in any transnational history, some women survive, and some don’t. Glass charts the tides of her upbringing to document a father’s eventual abandonment as a way of capturing portraits of one’s self and one’s mother. ‘My family was from Korea, peninsula of hungry ghosts & skyscrapers,’ the speaker says, and this book is filled with hunger and ghosts—hungers of not eating, of eating the food left out for the dead, hunger as a negative space for those who are not with us in the realm of the living. Glass demonstrates a resilience in haunting, spare lyric: ‘trying to put aside a lifetime of neglect is like trying / to reverse photographs, to fade images from memory / until they are empty, white squares.’ None of these poems are empty of course; each brims with the thrum of heartbeat and memories warm from constant attendance.” — Diana Khoi Nguyen