Kim is the recipient of multiple literary prizes including the Kim Su-yeong Literature Award (1996) for her poem "A Poor Love Machine", the Sowol Poetry Prize (2000), and the Midang Literary Award (2006), which are named after three renowned contemporary Korean poets.

[12] Her poems have been translated into many languages (Swedish, French, German, Polish, Persian, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Danish, etc).

[21] Kim's poetry collections include: From another star (1981), Father's scarecrow (1985), The Hell of a certain star (1987), Our negative picture (1991), My Upanishad, Seoul (1994), A Poor Love Machine (1997), To the Calendar Factory Manager (2000), A Glass of Red Mirror (2004), Your First (2008), Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2011), Blossom, Pig (2016), Autobiography of Death (2016), and Wing Phantom Pain (2019).

Kim Hyesoon's poetry was used for Jenny Holzer's exhibit at the Korean National Museum of Modern contemporary Art.

[22] Kim's skill as a writer resides in her facility at combining poetic images with experimental language while simultaneously grounding her work in ‘feminine writing’ drawn from female experiences.

A landmark feminist poet and critic in her native South Korea, Kim Hyesoon's surreal, dagger-sharp poetry has spread from hemisphere to hemisphere in the past ten years, her works translated to Chinese, Swedish, English, French, German, Dutch, Danish and beyond.

The birdlike Kim weaves a pattern of poems, so strangely compelling and curious, and utterly unlike anything I had heard before.

""Female Poet" as Revolutionary Grotesque: Feminist Transgression in the Poetry of Ch'oe Sŭng-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yŏn-ju".