Dance Dance Revolution.(Brief article)(Book review)

* Dance Dance Revolution CATHY PARK HONG. Norton, $23.95 (128p) ISBN 978-0-393-06484-1

This deeply political Barnard Women Poets Prize-winning second book is part poetic sequence, part science fiction: in a future city called the Desert--a Vegas-like manmade tourist trap--a character called the Guide shows another, the Historian, the sights. The Guide has survived the historical Kwangju uprising, a 1980 massacre of students and other prodemocracy protesters by the American-backed South Korean dictatorship. The Guide's speeches--all in verse--turn repeatedly to her own life story, detailed in a superbly invented dialect, based on English but incorporating Spanish and …