YONGIN — Ha Sang-man, a poet whose books have sold 200,000 copies, has published his first collection of essays, "They Will End Up Someone Else's Cat."
The book is the first title in "A Poet's Drawer," a new essay series from Byeolkkot Publishing, based in Yongin.
The series focuses not on dramatic events in a poet's life but on ordinary days and small sensations. It is conceived as an effort to restore the quiet of print and the discipline of refined language in an era awash in short-form content and sensational writing. The books show how a poet looks at daily life and how that life turns into sentences. Readers are meant to find, inside the poet's drawer, a day that resembles their own.
In this book, Ha lives not with a "companion cat" but with "guest cats." Rather than adopting cats as family, he fosters them, offering a place to stay for a while.
It is the work of caring for a creature that will someday belong to another household. The book records that tender, lonely stretch of time. The title carries that sentiment directly.
The poet cleans the litter box every day, puts out food and water, and takes the cats to the clinic. He plays hunting games with them and cleans up after their accidents, much like any other cat owner.
The one difference is that a parting is already scheduled. Ha quietly shows how to withhold nothing of his affection even in the face of that appointed goodbye.
The cats Let, Darim and Gori appear in the book. Living alongside them, the poet reflects on life and relationships, on waiting and on taming.
There are no grand lessons and no inflated emotion. Instead, in plain sentences, he writes down the care he feels while they are near. The record of the cats widens, at some point, into a story about people.
In a blurb for the book, the poet Na Tae-ju wrote that "these cozy cat stories do not stop at being stories about cats — they expand into stories about people."
He added that the book gives "the feeling of reading a series of linked fairy tales, and at times the feeling of reading prose poems," saying it "left even my own heart clearer."
The poet Jung Hyun-woo called the book "a record of the feelings human beings wanted, in the end, to protect." The cats, he said, no longer remain mere animals but become "the name of every being that passed briefly through our lives."
Ha made his literary debut in 2005 after winning the New Writer's Award from the magazine Munhak Sasang. He has published the poetry collection "I Called You Because It Was Cold" and the general-interest books "Poems Read in the Science Lab" and "Poems Read in Literature Class." He is also a recipient of the Kim Gu-yong Poetry Literature Award.