"COMMENTARY ON THE BIRDS is an eco-geopolitical hybrid narrative created from Jed Munson's field work, field notes, criticism, and memoir. As a biracial Korean American, Munson's navigation route to and from the DMZ on the Korean peninsula is often disjointed and disparate, yet such migratory pattern may be one of many identities and languages of diaspora itself. This brilliant book can also be read as a field guide to seeking and observing diasporic self and birds."--Don Mee Choi
"In lyric and documentary prose on themes of ecology and art, Jed Munson's essays invite readers to consider the layered complexity of the Korean DMZ. Munson's COMMENTARY ON THE BIRDS is a daring act of the literary imaginary--that finds the connection between landscape and psyche."--Erica Hunt
"This delirious DMZ, this travelogue of incisive blundering through collective fictions and negative space, this blowing of molten han into binoculars, joins a specific ecology that includes Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony and Na Mira's The Book of Na, and is one of the most thoughtful, thought-provoking books of our century."--Brandon Shimoda
"Combining poetry, criticism, and (auto)ethnographic observation, COMMENTARY ON THE BIRDS is a powerful contemplation of the Demilitarized Zone as a bounded geographic area, a product of unended war, a wilderness preserve, a subject of cultural production, and a psychic terrain. This book is a gift, and I'm grateful for it now more than ever."--Grace M. Cho
Literary Nonfiction. Essay. Art. Film. Nature. Asian & Asian American Studies.
