Abstract: Waste is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary life; it is ever present across the biosphere—from the "forever chemicals" in ocean sprays to microplastics in Arctic ice—and perpetually marginalized, despite its endless accumulation. Both an intimate part of daily life and an unthinkable abyss, waste, or garbage, is the abject other of our society. How then can we figure this concept poetically? How can literature evoke waste on its own terms and mine its metaphoric depths? Kim Hyesoon's poetry provides one answer. By embracing the proliferation of waste, both its materiality and its symbolic import, she shows how it offers a radical revaluation of conventional values and hierarchies and reveals the eschatological reality of the contemporary era. In Kim's work, waste is the starting point of an ontological overload in which every object becomes overdetermined. Kim therefore explores garbage as a figure for a generalized form of sublime excess.
Thomas Storey (Sat,) studied this question.