>Don Mee Choi’s urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but “during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.” Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all “victims of History,” so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist.
—Judges’ citation, National Book Award

Choi’s project is one of interpretation—between Korean and English, text and image, transcription and imagined experience—which becomes “an anti-neocolonial mode” and a way to remember victims of state violence. Choi creates a logic and language that carves a space for counternarrative, and that questions what it means to be human in the face of ongoing wars. … Virtuosic in its range and empathy, this is a book that shifts the reader’s understanding of historical narrative from one of war to one of flight.
—Publishers Weekly

To read the work of Don Mee Choi is to readjust our vision—not only of the modern world at war and violence sustained at borders, but also of how war and borders shape our language and percolate into the art that we see. Her poetry is one that will not be confined within the margins of a book, but spill into drawings, photographs, videos, and passports.

—Sohini Basak, Wasafiri

Choi’s hybrid structure allows her, in some sense, to have it both ways—to look at her subjects while simultaneously, and paradoxically, showing that some subjects are just too big to see in full: war, your parents’ life before and without you, your government and its decisions.
—Kathleen Rooney, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Her writing has showed me that discomfort is neither cruel nor condemnation, but a passageway towards freedom, or towards becoming feral, or freely frayed.
—Christine Shan Shan Hou, Lit Hub