Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms

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 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?