Notes from the Divided Country has been well received by critics who review and study it. Critics praise the poems for their eloquence and their balance of wisdom and pain. They regard Kim's poetic voice as fresh and promising, based on her first published collection. Carol Muske-Dukes of the Los Angeles Times, for example, calls the volume an “important debut” that “deserves close and celebratory attention.” Muske-Dukes finds the poems “unforgettable.” Similarly, Frank Bidart of Ploughshares hails the book as “brilliant,” adding that it is “one of the most remarkable debuts” he has read. He writes that the poems in this collection “surprise not only by their ambition and ferocity but by their delicacy, their sudden reserves of stillness and contemplation.”

Kim's readers find that the struggle and pain described in her poems are equaled by the restorative power of the verse expressing them. The Georgia...