With attention to the Japanese occupation, the Korean War and its
aftermath, The People's Field reflects on the sounds, ideas and
histories of the Korean peninsula. Of her selection, contest judge Jenny
Yang Cropp writes, "Kwon's manuscript contains a paradoxical experience
of both movement and stillness, history and the eternal present. These
poems, short and spare, carry the intensity of distillation but resist
the epigrammatic as they show us a rich and complex landscape that asks
for and earns reading after reading."