Hannah Sanghee Park
Puns are the highest and lowest form of wordplay. At worst, they’re schlocky uncle jokes that remind you why you only see that part of the family once a year. But in their most exalted form, puns restore physicality to language, reminding us that words have many senses, facets, and valences. They’re charged stones we can pick up off the page or remove from our mouths and throw at people.
Hannah Sanghee Park’s first book of poems, The Same-Different (LSU Press), winner of the 2014 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, makes invigorating use of this most maligned literary device. Her poems send the mind racing down the rabbit holes Park digs for it…
