Sea Changes by Hayun Cho is the seventh chapbook in Abode's 2024-2025 lineup and is officially available for pre-order! All orders will be shipped by early July. There are only 100 copies of this chapbook available, so make sure to get your copy while you can!
Book Description: Sea Changes by Hayun Cho is a hybrid collection that weaves theories of survival and transformation in the face of negotiating rage, grief, pleasure, kinship, and the Korean diaspora. The collection imagines everyday life and the natural world as mediums of revelation through which another world may be possible, traversing kitchens, attics, cities, and seasons. At turns argumentative and mystical, Sea Changes explores the intersections between women’s embodiment, intergenerational memory, and creative practice. The errant lyric voice, buoyed by the intimacies of sisterhood and friendship, arrives at the necessity of dreaming. Sea Changes reflects upon the insurgent promise of being the reader and writer of one’s life.
About the Author: Hayun Cho’s poetry appears in The Rumpus, The Margins, Portland Review, Cream City Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Hayun is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Notre Dame. She holds a PhD and MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Southern California and a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University. Hayun’s creative and scholarly work explores the relationship between gender and sexuality, emotion, and creative practice in feminist cultural production. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
Praise for Sea Changes by Hayun Cho:
"Hayun's poems are enveloped in the tender meat of a soft, colorful creature with a poisonous stinger. Like waves, they push and pull, lapping at the shores of our deepest longing. Otherworldly yet grounded in the sticky matter that makes up our lives, Hayun's writing stares back at history's capacious glare, and within her gaze, home moves through us like ocean water."
—Ashia Ajani, author of Heirloom
"Hayun Cho's Sea Changes is a captivating new take on womanhood, feminine rage, diaspora, consumption, and the responsibilities we bear and carry as our ancestors' descendants. Seemingly mundane moments between women - as in 'I walk to the Korean grocery store to buy apples' where an elder teaches her how to select the best ones - and haunting imaginings - such as 'A House Full of Women Who Live Forever' where dream women become her allies - are given equal weight and opportunity to move readers. With precision and beauty, this is a collection that, much like Cho's ghosts, will stay with you long after the last poem rings true."
—Sofía Aguilar, author of amor. and STREAMING SERVICE: season two
ISBN: 979-8-9900598-6-3
Publication Date: 7/1/2025
Copies will officially be distributed in early July.