What people are saying.

  • Jack Saebyeok Jung’s poetry, with its perpetual metonymic adjacency, draws beautiful and radiant patterns of curves. Within the house of memory, those spirals revolve, and as time and space are swept into them in a nonlinear flow, a multi-layered vortex called a poem takes off. Inside this vortex lives a pure-hearted youth, gazing directly at the poet. The speech of the youth animates language as though it were a living organism.

    — Kim Hyesoon, author of Phantom Pain Wings, the winner of 2023 National Book Critics' Circle Award. 

  • This is a poetics of place without locus, of lost origins and bogus ideologies, but it’s neither cynical nor nihilistic in its pursuit of imaginative magic. Jung’s “fat tree of incandescent lighting hung/ with wet eggplants” yields “a pure conception/ of a supernova.”

    — Mark Levine, author of Debt and Sound Fury.

  • Jack Saebyok Jung’s Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus should be read in “the cosmic microwave background glow” of a magic garden. This book has a secret ogre inside, who will accompany you while traversing its journey – from the innocent complexities of childhood to the larger geopolitical maelstrom populated by a huge and colorful cast.

    — Sawako Nakayasu, author of Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are From and Pink Waves.Quote Source

  • Jack Jung measures from a crow's eye view the exact distance between the approach of memory and the departure of the present, the attraction of the mask and the ambivalence of intimacy, and locates that micropoint where these binaries invert to make a mirror, make a poem.

    — Joyelle McSweeney, author of Death Styles

  • Wound tight with rhymes, haunted by histories (as people are too), delighted and delightful and lit from within, the poems of Jack Saebyok Jung have arrived, the work of a whole artist.

    — Alan Michael Parker, author of Bingo, Bango, Boingo.

  • Keenly observant, curious, and playful, Jack Saebyok Jung’s Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus (re)imagines and examines scenarios from both the speaker’s youth and fantasy… If you want a book that is tender yet wild with wonder, deep yet airy in its insights, or serious yet silly about itself, Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus is the one for you.

    — Emily Jungmin Yoon, author of A Cruelty to Special to Our Species and Find Me as the Creature I Am.oes here

  • With echoes of war and fairytales, Jack Saebyok Jung draws on Christian pageants and deep Greek mythology for his explosive debut collection. From trivia night to Korean hair salons, this child of 90s television programming zips from channel to channel at the speed of light… How new, and necessary, to be reassured that even after all that alienation, “I love you. I love you with all my heart”.

    — Stella Wong, author of Spooks and Stems.on goes here