DDungDDang FamilyA Review of Heo Yeon's Poetry Collection 『Peonies and an Empty Lot』
Hello? This is the Ddungddang family. The moment I opened this book, with its blue cover and simple line drawing, I sensed something unusual. If I had to describe this collection in one word, it's "funny-sad." It's funny yet sad, trivial yet deep. Jirimalryeol (支離滅裂): a state of being scattered and torn this way and that, impossible to grasp. Not fitting together front to back and lacking system or unity. Yes, that's exactly my life. 😅 It felt oddly welcoming because it resembled my daily life, where everything is scattered in jirimalryeol fashi
Hello?
This is the Ddungddang family.
The moment I opened this book, with its blue cover and simple line drawing, I sensed something unusual.
If I had to describe this collection in one word, it's "funny-sad." It's funny yet sad, trivial yet deep.
Peonies and an Empty Lot — Heo Yeon2025Moonji Publishing
Jirimalryeol (支離滅裂): a state of being scattered and torn this way and that, impossible to grasp. Not fitting together front to back and lacking system or unity.
Yes, that's exactly my life. 😅
It felt oddly welcoming because it resembled my daily life, where everything is scattered in jirimalryeol fashion.
As if someone had put a name to my life.
This poem, which begins with the story of a stray cat named 'Echo' that showed up at a campsite, makes you chuckle as you read while also leaving a bitter taste somewhere.
A phone flies off its trajectory while jumping on a trampoline, a friend who borrowed money has changed cars,
and the campsite staff go around shouting that "using a personal heater can kill you."
Maybe it was a strange kind of comfort, thinking "Ah, everyone lives like this."
"Aren't you embarrassed to be walking with your mom?"
The mother with a bad leg, who hung her head in front of Dongyang Seorim bookstore in Hyehwa-dong after being called in by the student affairs teacher.
The boy never managed to answer, and that night something "like broken musical notes" poured down by his sleeping head.
It was a poem that conveyed perfectly the guilt toward one's parents that everyone carries somewhere in a corner of their heart.
"Hantangang" is the story of a six-year-old, left at someone else's house, between a mother sick with an epidemic disease and a father who goes to the US military base.
Eating rice rinsed in water in a room with no electricity where bedbugs bite, what that small child thought every day was:
"I thought about whether living was better or dying was better / I was six years old"
The moment I read that passage, I had to set the book down for a moment.
As a parent raising children myself, the fact that a six-year-old lived with thoughts like these was so heart-wrenching and painful.
Thinking about what my own child thought at six, the fact that a child that age weighed life against death didn't just pass me by.
That it can show such a deep wound without a single flashy rhetorical flourish — and that the wound hasn't healed even half a century later.
As I get older, poems like this seem to weigh on me more heavily.
Overall Verdict
『Peonies and an Empty Lot』 is not a pretty, sweet poetry collection.
Instead, it looks very honestly at the roughest, most jirimalryeol corners of life.
So after reading it, rather than feeling at ease, it feels like the dust of old emotions has been brushed off.
This collection quietly tells us that living in a jirimalryeol way is nothing to be ashamed of, and that even a trivial day can be literature enough.
A collection where the smallness of daily life and deep reflection coexist, with the power to elevate our shabby, hardscrabble reality into literature.
When you want to feel pleasantly melancholy amid a reality that wavers without any sense of direction, be sure to pull it out and read it.
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