Halifax Chronicle-Herald reviews Human Resources

Sang Kim is a Korean-Canadian playwright whose second play, A Dream Called Laundry (KCLF-21, $17.99), deals with the trauma inflicted on survivors of a Japanese Imperial Army rape-camp in Korea in the mid-1940s and their overseas offspring in the later 1970s.

Jewish-Canadian writer Rachel Zolf’s third book of poetry, Human Resources (Coach House, $16.95), extends the verbal and linguistic experimentation of her first two, short-listed books, Masque (2004) and Her absence, this wanderer (1999).

Both Kim and Zolf live in Toronto, but where Kim trusts in language to unearth and condemn atrocities, Zolf suspects that even the plainest words — from government documents and business press releases — will lapse (or spill) into poetry, perhaps indecipherable, but still poetry.

During its bloody campaign to create a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" in the 1930s and 1940s (an empire to rival the pitiless, pillaging machines assembled by Western Europe and the United States), Japan herded Korean women into army brothels.

These victims, termed "comfort women," have begun, in recent years, to protest their wartime agony, and Kim’s play takes up their cause.

Though Kim is male, his Acknowledgments state, tantalizingly, "Those dark voices in the other room, late into the night, were all from my head." Were some "voices" those of female survivors he knows? Whatever the answer to that question, A Dream Called Laundry presents thoroughly believable characters.

Soo is a 52-year-old Korean and Japanese rape-camp survivor who is now a laundress in Toronto. She and her supposedly mentally infirm sister Grace — her speeches are sheer poetry — live with Sally, Soo’s 33-year-old daughter.

It is 1978 and Sally, with a view to marriage, is dating Dennis, a Japanese-Canadian man who is nearly a decade younger than her.

Soo’s decision to split the pair triggers this two-act drama’s tragic end. Inspired by her sour belief that "Korean, Japs, no mix. Make for big problem," Soo is also embittered by her memory of her betrayal and abandonment by Hiro, her wartime Japanese soldier-lover.

Through Soo’s poignant flashbacks to the horrors of her exploitation and her doomed hopes for a life with Hiro, Kim stresses the bleak point that despite half-a-world’s distance and three decades gone, the trauma of wartime continues to wreak havoc on the lives of survivors like Soo and Grace, and even upon the innocent, new generation represented by Sally and Dennis.

Never didactic, Kim’s play recalls Judith Thompson’s drama, The Crackwalker, with its crackling language and unflinching study of an urban underclass, and also George Ryga’s play, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, treating the rape and martyrdom of a native Canadian woman.

Of chief importance, though, is Kim’s writing, as in these lines given Grace: "You don’t have to go to church to believe in eternal damnation, silly. We’re all damned from the moment we’re born."

Rachel Zolf reworks even the most deliberately opaque prose to release its hidden, subversive poetry. She cuts away at bland compositions to turn up mysteriously mixed metaphors and unexpected verbs — and to fuse usually drab phrases to locate unusually beautiful vivacity.

In Start here, one reads, "All excess excised save the discrete pithy moment. Sonnet’s rising eight lines, sublime / orgasmic turn, dying six: perfect expenditure," a mixture of business, erotic and academic terms.

Move on to the line, "New performance weightings a bit of a moving target / the future liability of make this sing," and one can see its probable formation from four different sources: "New performance weightings" (accounting jargon?); "a bit of a moving target" (political speech?); "the future liability of" (legal brief?); "make this sing" (editorial comment on a manuscript?).

Zolf’s poems are cut-ups and re-arrangements of already existing discourse. Her peculiar, piercing insight is that snoozy, staid prose can be rendered wild poetry via a careful rejigging.

All reading is, then, discovery: "Killing themselves, Levi, Amery, Benjamin felt ‘poor with / words,’ while Wiesel emerged from 10 years’ silence to / shake hands with Ronald Reagan."

One is tempted to add, "Shake Hands with the Devil."