Watching Television in a Love Motel

The title of this first collection by Haro Lee is provocative – redolent as it is of short stays, hurriedness, and possibly secrecy. When these are backgrounded by the activity of watching television, we get poems that sing, shout, celebrate, and rebel: all the elements of troubled tempestuous youth. Haro Lee may be troubled, but her experiences also cause her to confront herself with astonishing honesty. And it’s this that makes her work so compelling.

The section Daytime Television starts us off. How to Refill a Disposable BIC Lighter has the writer and a friend holed up with cocaine and companionship. “For five short days / we’re adrift on something so / magical. It’s a girls’ world / in this filthy apartment.” Laughter, grief, and confession abound, and the writer is left with the eponymous lighter as a precious souvenir.

We progress to Primetime Television. If I wasn’t primed already, From These Gutters, My Mother would shock me with its graphic images. We read of a “Botticelli belly” and “This mistake she makes / with the father, the one / who enters growing girls / without clumsy” and what the baby after arriving is subjected to.

I really enjoyed Needing Religion at Nineteen. Our writer admits to her dissatisfaction at being born in the Year of the Rat – that is until she sees an exhibition of Banksy’s rat series and what he has to say about it. “OK, I’ll take that for why I’m here then”, she declares. Self-doubt and longing for assurances – not least of an afterlife – predominate. Once again, frankness is paramount and appealing. “So when it’s my time to go / I can say that I tried.”

Graveyard Slot is a lengthy narrative recounting Lee’s life in a small neighbourhood in Seoul, capital of South Korea and home to her beloved grandmother. Detailed, graphic, and touchingly nostalgic – if ever there was material for a TV documentary, this is it!