The orphan at the center of Litany for the Long Moment is without homeland and without language. In an extended lyric essay, Mary-Kim Arnold attempts to claim her own linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic lineage. Born in Korea and adopted to the U.S. as a child, she explores the interconnectedness of language and identity through the lens of migration and cultural rupture. Invoking artists, writers, and thinkers –Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Francesca Woodman, Susan Sontag, among others – Litany for the Long Moment interweaves personal documents, images, and critical texts as a means to examine longing, loss, and identity.

Carla Harryman, from the Introduction:

Litany for the Long Moment is an assemblage of concise and poetic responses to unanswerable questions grounded in memory’s combinatory powers and in the pronouncements and obscurities of the personal archive and public document. It is a work that seeks to retrieve impossible-to-access realities, which extend through and beyond the singular experiences of poverty and diaspora of the author’s early Korean life and unforeseeable, future trauma in the American world of the new mother. Arnold’s deft employment of commonplace items, such as a graph of the Hangul alphabet or the Korean television program questionnaire (which she uses as a compositional prompt throughout the essay), guides the reader through a terrain of never-settled fact, difficult desire, and obscurity of persons and histories that animate her excursion into zones of personal and philosophical doubt.

Brian Blanchfield:

Among the scant effects that Mary-Kim Arnold reviews and scrutinizes from her family’s adoption file on her are aging photographs of the two-year-old she was in 1973, in a Korean orphanage and during transit to the U. S., and attendant documents that constitute “the ‘social study,’ of which I am the subject.” In this book-length essay the study is reactivated, the social is repurposed, and the subject herself has become investigator. This poignant, careful, open inquest, this record of disclosure and its transcultural complexities, reveals not only a deeply capable writer but also an expert in the natures of loss and claim. It is she who can ask, “Shouldn’t I know, after all, what I want from all this looking?” and also determine that “being visible is not the same as being seen.

Ed Park:

Discovering Mary-Kim Arnold's writing online is one of the three or four things which, to me, justify the Internet. Now at last comes this piercing miracle of a book, at once a yearning for and interrogation of the mother she never knew, ‘a language I do not speak, the life I will never have.’ It's heir to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE and the traditional female writing known as kyubang kasa—'‘the lyrical voice of the inner room.’ Don't forget to take your heart out of your throat when you finish.

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