Mailbox: Rey and Kevin

Items received: Two books of poetry, one personal letter. January 2022.

Enclosed were two books of poetry and a personal letter.

Water Letters is a collection of letters written between Rey Jeong and Ellie Schmidt.

““I admire things: fluid, soft, and transformative. Now, I pray with water.””

— Rey Jeong, in her poetry collection Mining Gold

A chronicle of correspondence between friends, Water Letters has a heartwarming quality that exposes the depth of their friendship. That the top pages of the manuscript exhibit small signs of water damage only heightens the way in which this collection draws you in to Rey and Ellie’s personal correspondence.

Mining Gold, by Rey Jeong, brilliantly overturns stereotypes and preconceptions and creates a uniquely multicultural and bilingual collection of poetry. On the first page, Rey discusses learning English as an adult, but far from shrinking from writing English poetry, she instead embraces her newfound language, noting “I can’t find words in the right place./But,/Ironically, I found liberation in using words about/my unconscious and emotions, which I never had in/Korean.”

Korean is also scattered throughout the collection, strengthening the interplay between language, culture, and real or imaged foreignness.

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