Unbearable Splendor
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
Praise for Sun Yung Shin:
Finalist for the Believer Poetry Award
"[her] work reads like redactions, offering fragments to be explored, investigated and interrogated, making her reader equal partner in the creation of meaning."—Star Tribune
Sun Yung Shin moves ideas—of identity (Korean, American, adoptee, mother, Catholic, Buddhist) and interest (mythology, science fiction, Sophocles)— around like building blocks, forming and reforming new constructions of what it means to be at home.
What is a cyborg but a hybrid creature of excess? A thing that exceeds the sum of its parts. A thing that has extended its powers, enhanced, even superpowered.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her third collection, Shin (Rough, and Savage) develops a cybernetic poetic through the employment of lyric loops, diagrams, epigrams, academic screeds, and assorted documents. This feat of varied language and form reveals Shin's innovative poetic thinking and malleable conception of what a work of poetry might be capable of accomplishing. In particular, she explores the Korean adoptee narrative through the lens of the cyborg. Shin's epigraph quotes Donna Haraway, author of "A Cyborg Manifesto," and Roy Batty, a replicant from the film Blade Runner, to set the tone, and she returns to the theme later in the collection, asking, "Is Antigone the original cyborg?" Experimental poetry often erases the personal, but Shin's formal experimentation is both political and intimate. For example, she includes several copies of documents, among them her own family registration from South Korea that designated her as an adoptee to the U.S. "I didn't know I was human," Shin writes. "My past was invented, implanted, and accepted. I'm more real than you are because I know I'm not real." These strange, kinetic fairy tales illuminate Shin's novel take on the adoptee narrative and her visionary use of language.
