Timothy Yu places Kim in a group of Asian American poets at the close of the 20th century (also including John Yau and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge) who focused on "fragmentation, linguistic exploration, and cultural hybridity".
"[3] According to Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Kim's literary method is driven by the idea that "the forces that have displaced and moved bodies across the globe become legible when we track the traces of the lives they touched."
[6] Steven G. Yao of Hamilton College notes, however, that Asian American writers such as Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, David Mura, Kimiko Hahn, and Timothy Liu have received more popular and scholarly attention than Kim.
[7] In a review of Dura, Sueyeun Juliette Lee called her poetry "beautiful in its percussive, incisively unflinching attention to language, and also in its gentle envelopment of the slightest sentiments.
[8] Yu favorably compared Commons and Penury (2009) with her first collection Under Flag (1991), writing that "Kim has sharpened and broadened her political critiques in response to an evolving landscape of global capitalism, disaster, terror, and violence.