Passing Notes in Secret
by Melanie Hyo-In Han
Melanie Hyo-In Han
Born in Korea and raised in East Africa, Melanie Hyo-In Han recently moved from the U.S. to the U.K. She is the author of Passing Notes in Secret (boats against the current, 2025), Abecedarian: Banff, Canada (kith books, 2025), My Dear Yeast (Milk & Cake Press, 2023), and Sandpaper Tongue, Parchment Lips (Finishing Line Press, 2021), as well as the translator of several collections of Spanish poetry (Hebel Ediciones). Han has been awarded fellowships from the Kees Eijrond Foundation, Gladstone’s Library, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and Casa Uno. She has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and awards from The International Human Rights Art Movement, "Boston in 100 Words," The Lyric Magazine, and elsewhere. Currently, she is finishing her Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Surrey, where she teaches undergraduate seminars in the School of Literature and Languages. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Flora Fiction and the Two Languages Prize Editor at Gasher Press. Learn more about her at melaniehan.com.
praise for Passing Notes in Secret
Melanie Hyo-In Han’s Passing Notes in Secret asks us to consider the limits and possibilities of language. The poet speaks to us through the preservers of the Korean language during the Japanese Occupation, and through the recounting of her own history across countries, cultures, and languages. Han’s search for home reveals a tapestry of multiplicities that shows us how Korean, English, and Swahili can exist simultaneously on the page, against poetic form, and within herself. Through elegance and experimentation, the everyday and the historical, Han sings to us of cultural distance and intimacies, home and homeland, from “the roots entangled/ under my tongue/ the vines between my gums/ the flower hanging/ from my uvula swaying/ back and forth.” This is a beautiful, intricate collection.
- Angela Siew, author of Coming Home
Passing Notes in Secret is a lyrical and intimate exploration of identity, belonging, and the inheritances of language. Through poetry that blends Korean and English, Melanie Hyo-In Han weaves a transnational poetics that traces the complexities of migration, cultural multiplicity, and longing for home. From Seoul to London, Dar es Salaam to Gloucester, Han’s voice is both tender and resilient, capturing the nuanced experiences of growing up between worlds. With formal inventiveness and emotional depth, these poems are a tribute to the quiet power of language preservation in the face of violence both mundane and extraordinary, and the fragments of self that persist across borders. “i split/ my mouth open/ like ripe fruit” writes Han, and out spills a collection of luminous poems honoring those who carry their homes within themselves – those who “carry memories in/ every precious root.”
- Grace H. Zhou, author of Soil Called a Country
The letterforms of Korean hangeul weave compellingly through Melanie (Hyo-In) Han’s Passing Notes in Secret, “the roots entangled/under my tongue.” In one poem, “The wind whispers 살랑살랑” while in another, Han addresses “ㅜㅐㅌ ㅇnㅌs wㅐㅇ ㅜㅇrㅌ my Kㅇrㅌan ㅜㅇ pㅣㅌcㅌs.” Her shapeshifting poetics disorients but also reorients the reader, viscerally connecting us to the speaker’s sense of dislocation and search for home via people, place, food, and language. These moving poems remind us the search to “find my whole self/no borders” is not only an immigrant experience but a fundamentally human one.
- Hyejung Kook, author of Once Is Not Enough
