'I thought to myself that I needed to sing death, perform a rite for death, write death, then bid farewell to it.' The title section of Kim Hyesoon's visceral Autobiography of Death consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation.

Kim Hyesoon has won major acclaim in Korea and internationally and, in Don Mee Choi's English translation, has won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the first time a translated title has won the award. Kim's poetry has been translated into many languages.