Cathy Park Hong’s first book, Translating Mo’Um, made poetry out of a representation of Asian American life that skewers the exoticizing currents in American culture while, at the same time, ironizing and breathing life into the twisting singularities of dialect like few other living poets. “Translating,” in this sense, is what Hong’s work has always made its central labor, but not without a recognition that for a voice deemed “other,” that labor is just as likely to feel bitter, coerced, an act of precarious Scheherazade-like survivalism. Dance Dance Revolution, published in 2007 and chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women’s Prize, realizes Hong’s breathtaking powers on an ambitious scale: it proposes a “Desert” in which exiles, some of whom are survivors of the Kwangju massacre, a violence carried out by the murderous authorities of a US-backed Korean government in 1980—“comparable to Tiananmen Square, brutally repressed with the support of the US,” writes Rich in the citation.