The Corrected Version
At its heart, Rosanna Young Oh’s debut collection of poems, The Corrected Version, is an immigrant narrative that ponders what it means to be an American. Who or what do we leave behind when we move to a new country? Who or what do we take with us? Traveling through Korean folklore, paintings, Long Island, a family grocery store, and Buddhism, the book meditates on the process of making meaning out of the lives we create for ourselves—a task that has the speaker relentlessly questioning, investigating, erasing, and rewriting the stories she ultimately chooses to inherit as her own. A book about survival, it is also a journey made gentle by moments of love and compassion.
The Corrected Version has been reviewed or featured in Shondaland, Ms. Magazine, The Harvard Review, Washington Independent Review of Books, World Literature Today, The Colorado Review, Prism International, and Asian Review of Books.
Rosanna Young Oh
is the author of The Corrected Version, which won the North American Poetry Book Award judged by Lisa Russ Spaar.
Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Birmingham Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Beloit Poetry Journal, Graywolf Lab, among other publications. She has received support and residencies from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, the Hudson Valley Writing Center, the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the New York State Writers Institute. Her poetry was also the subject of a solo exhibition at the Queens Historical Society, where she was an artist-in-residence.
A graduate of Yale (B.A.), the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins (M.F.A.), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.A.), Rosanna lives on Long Island. She is currently The Bill & Doris Lippman Visiting Poet at the City College of New York, CUNY.
Select Poems
The Yale Review: “Hide-and-Seek”
The Slowdown: “Feeding the Koi”
The Margins: “Eternity” and “The Woman with Leaves for Hands”
Select Reviews
The Los Angeles Review of Books: “New Languages, New Music”
32 Poems: “In Search of New Worlds”
Select Interviews
Amsterdam Review: “The Human Mind Is Its Own World”
The Common: “The Magnetic Pull of Place”
Poetry Off the Shelf: “The Eldest Daughter”
Praise for The Corrected Version
“In poems by turn intergenerational, mythic, historical, personal, and ekphrastic, The Corrected Version offers the reader a revised look at an experience of immigrant life that is often misunderstood or oversimplified.”
— Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems
“The poems of The Corrected Version are ones of departure and stranding, and consequent metaphysical longing. In a collection that abounds with transportations to faraway landscapes and with Korean mythos, the author’s parents and familial figures are lodestones to understanding the frustrations of immigration.”
— S.K. Rancy, World Literature Today
“There is poetry and dignity in unadorned reality, but it takes subtle skill and conviction to convey.”
— Marissa Grunes, The Harvard Review
“The tacit questionings in The Corrected Version are brave and forthright: what stories are true? what is love and what is duty? what are the limits to hope and certainty? The voice in this collection feels disillusioned from the start, but allows for expansive identifications, bodily as well as spiritual. In it, we can feel how well the paradox of desire and duty, or the inner life swelling and the external world diminishing, fits our sense of things if we care to notice.”
— Sandra Lim, author of The Curious Thing
“The dream is always about freedom and survival and love, the song about what life’s real costs are. Rosanna Young Oh’s brilliant first collection of poems, The Corrected Version, is the best kind of poetry—fresh, ambitious, sardonic, wise, bittersweet, efficient with edges—the kind that says I am worth paying attention to. Trust me, reader, Oh is that and more.”
— Dave Smith, author of Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry
“The speaker of Rosanna Young Oh’s first poetry collection, The Corrected Version, serves as a bridge between two distinctly different cultures which the poet manages only through her emotional commitment to living and feeling both sides, deeply. ”
— Bruce Weigl, author of Among Elms, in Ambush
Rosanna Young Oh 