Winter Night Rabbit Worries
May 2026
Winter Night Rabbit Worries
$20.00
In stock
"...a surrealist and contemplative collection of prose poems full of detailed wonder, translated by Stine An with great attention to preserving a sense of boundless curiosity in its storytelling."
— Hua Xi
About the Book
Winter Night Rabbit Worries is Yoo Heekyung’s fifth poetry collection, published in Korean in 2023. Structured as a series of stories, the book presents narrative and linguistic architectures that dissolve the opposition between those materials that construct the this and the that side of life—past and future, truth and falsehood, memory and fantasy. As readers move from one story to another, they will encounter a dizzying yet tender experience in which the boundaries between self and other unravel, and new stories begin to take shape.
Author
Yoo Heekyung
(b. 1980) is an acclaimed Korean poet, playwright, and essayist. He is the author of over ten collections of poetry and prose, including Today’s Morning Vocabulary (『오늘 아침 단어』), Photography and Poetry (『사진과 시』), and And Next Spring We Will (『이다음 봄에 우리는』). He is a playwright with the theater company dock (독) and a member of the poetry collective jaknan (작란). A recipient of Today’s Young Artist Award from the South Korean Ministry of Culture and Hyundae Munhak Literary Award (2020), Yoo lives in Seoul where he runs the poetry bookshop and project space wit n cynical.
Translator
Stine An
is a poet, translator, and performer in New York City. Her poems and translations appear in Best Literary Translations 2024, Poem-a-Day, Best Experimental Writing 2018, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and elsewhere. A 2024 NEA Translation Fellow and 2022–2023 Emerge—Surface—Be Fellow, Stine is the author of S_MMER CR_SH (Sarabande Books) and the translator of Today’s Morning Vocabulary (Zephyr Press) and Winter Night Rabbit Worries (Ugly Duckling Presse) by South Korean poet Yoo Heekyung.
Praise
The story arrives like an overcoat emerging from a blizzard, its shoulders heavy with worries piled like snow. You shake off the snow, remove your wet coat, and pause to warm yourself by the stove. That pause is where Yoo Heekyung’s poems come into being: a moment when a kind heart stands quietly by the stove with its back turned to us.
— Kim So Yeon
Yoo Heekyung’s poems, stories, are reflections from the mylar chamber of nursery rhyme, memory, history. Yoo, aided by translator and poet Stine An, builds a world in situ—where whoever, or whatever, has left has already left, and whoever will come has not yet arrived. Activated by a quiet animism, from the titular winter night rabbit to a single withered twig, Yoo brings characters and images into focus, reframes them, and gently ushers them from the story, along with the reader; every word glowing in the breath of its neighbor, and undulating under the careful attention of Yoo and An,— or “that’s how I remember it” at least.
— Terrence Arjoon
Winter Night Rabbit Worries by Yoo Heekyung is a surrealist and contemplative collection of prose poems full of detailed wonder, translated by Stine An with great attention to preserving a sense of boundless curiousity in its storytelling. Small animals move through a landscape full of a sense of the unknown and the unsaid, filled with images of rain and fog. Things come out of nowhere and take on extraordinary meanings, then just as quickly disappear. These poems create a sense of delightful destabilization through images of startling strangeness, such as an ear sitting in a chair or stories, personified, as they gather around a fire. The poems seem to ask us to consider all the things around us as unheard of characters in unfamiliar plots, and to reconsider what it means to tell a story.
— Hua Xi
Praise for Previous Work
The poems of Yoo Heekyung are a beautiful resistance against time; they are landscapes painted with vestiges of sorrow. Reading his work, we begin to understand Yoo’s insistence that “tragedy demands courage.” His poetry is a canvas of light with endless folds. Our work as readers is to hold onto this light, letting its canvas unfurl into the stretches of space and time. Yoo’s poems require meticulous attention and readers must smooth out the furrows of their hearts to align with his to absorb the precise beauty of language. Scenes from the past he conceals within vanished light are resurrected as present-day losses. Because of this, his landscapes betray the very notion of a landscape. With a casual demeanor, he calms his entire being, like death, to arrange objects and people beneath the light of his poetry—but, in the end, readers will drown in the breathtakingly sad and beautiful ravines of light.
— Kim Hyesoon
Yoo Heekyung writes poems that alchemize the weight of the world into nocturnes of ravishing melancholy. The poems are ferocious, tender and impossibly elegiac. The weather is heavy, but the poems abound with multidirectional love for this cast of multitudes. On top of that you also have, crouched inside like explosive pearls, trenchant critique. High praise is also due for the tremendous dexterity of translator Stine An, who wraps her arms around the wild edges of Yoo’s distinct poetic voice, like giving a hug to the rain while growing an umbrella.
— Sawako Nakayasu
Yoo Heekyung’s poems are less like photographs than like photography itself, an unlikely collaboration between fluids, silver, paper pulp, things and their traces, shadow and light. By this poetic process the momentary twins for eternity, an eternity paradoxically developed by a brief soak in the human bath. Translator and poet Stine An is the latest collaborator in Yoo’s photographic process, allowing English-language readers to recognize both Yoo’s absurd and humane ingenuity and his location along the lyric coordinates of Yi Sang, Frank O’Hara, Kim Hyesoon, Georg Trakl, Tomaž Šalamun, and others. Today’s Morning Vocabulary is an elixir, an invaluable tonic.
— Joyelle McSweeney
Excerpt
from “Stories of the Winter Forest”
The stories of the winter forest gather around the
bonfire Huddling their twiggy shoulders, they look
back on the events of the past year How forlorn are
their shadowy faces, the faraway cries of mountain
animals
Someone takes out a knife and removes the bark from
a log If you pick up one of the fallen names from the
forest floor and throw it into the flames, sparks will fly
As the soot sputters, a few will yawn at length, but no
one is headed to bed yet
The knife returns to its sheath What remains are the
stories of the winter forest The bare logs The names
scattered on the forest floor The night keeps on
growing darker The sound of a dry swallow to hold
back a cough The touch of a hand on a feverish
forehead
Everyone is listening carefully Say something, anyone
Last year has passed, and not much of this year
remains either The new year will dawn on us soon, yet
there remain so many things for us to look back on
and so many more nights that will befall us
And yet, the bonfire keeps on burning Their shadows
keep on glimmering Someone throws in a dried up,
denuded log into the fire It is such a sad story Was
such a sad story
Details
ISBN: 978-1-946604-53-8
Publication Date: May 1, 2026
