B-Dragon Suite

Bridging South Korea and Korean America, Kafka and K-pop, Stine An’s B-Dragon Suite is a revelatory libretto for the absurdist afterlives of modernity-coloniality. In this dazzling debut, An queers, camps, tickles, and remixes language into a series of shimmering anti-translations, transforming a journey through the underworld into candy-coated spectacles of visual poetry. Accompanied through this mirror world by Lil Bang, “your favorite soft power ethno-nationalist global sensation *pop* boy band,” we watch as “bomb” bubbles into the balms and blossoms of bom (spring), as gutters fill with dreams of a lemon-flavored limitlessness. Underneath it all, a troubling question pulsates: “But has anyone told you what it costs to make it back out of the underworld just to perform your role well enough to save others?” In conversation with a rich tradition of feminist Asian/American avant-garde poetic practice, B-Dragon Suite is both highly referential and wholly original; an intoxicating, brain-scratching joyride that is also deeply moving.

B-Dragon Suite is a book unlike anything you’ve read before—part K-pop performance notes, part emoji poetry, part meditation on the politics of language, wandering flowers, breastfeeding, dew, the infinity of Kafka’s lemonade, and the brutality of the Korean War. In this explosive debut, poet-translator Stine An playfully enacts a poetics of the b-side. B-Dragon Suite is an irreverent and thrilling chorus of voices and languages, a diaspora-song in a minor key sung from the marginal space of the underworld.