This practice-based PhD explores how contemporary poetry of the Korean diaspora engages with han – a complex emotion of sorrow, longing, and inherited grief rooted in Japanese occupation (1910-1945), the Korean War (1950-1953), and ongoing U.S. neo-colonial influences – through multilingual and fragmented/experimental poetic form.

The creative component, No Way of Returning Home, is an original poetry collection structured semi-chronologically from colonial-era Korea to the present, geographically moving from the Korean peninsula to East Africa, the U.S., and the U.K., often tracing my family’s histories and my own experiences as a member of the Korean diaspora. Through multiple languages and various poetic forms (e.g., fragmentation, mise en page, documentary poems, erasure and blackout, prose poetry, etc.), the collection enacts the same archival poetry of resistance that is examined in the critical chapters.

The critical component analyzes the works of three transnational Korean poets (Don Mee Choi, Cathy Park Hong, and Emily Jungmin Yoon) alongside my own poetry. I argue that these poets and I use multilingual and experimental poetic forms to deliberately challenge monolingual literary norms and narrative closure. By drawing on theories of postcolonialism, transnationalism, and contemporary poetics, this research addresses two gaps in existing scholarship: 1) the limited engagement with Korean poetry at the intersection of postcolonial and transnational studies and 2) the insufficient attention to the combination of multilingual strategies and experimental poetic forms as acts of resistance.

The creative and critical work in this thesis shows how poetry can (re)claim han across languages and locations.