Unbearable Splendor

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Unbearable Splendor

Title:

Unbearable Splendor

Author:

Shin, Sun Yung

Subject:

Poetry

Fiction

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 TribuneSun 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.

Publisher:

Coffee House Press

Date:

2016/09/19

Digital Format:

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Kindle

Language:

English

Summary

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.

Author Notes

Sun Yung Shin is the author of poetry collections Rough, and Savage and Skirt Full of Black , which won an Asian American Literary Award. She co-edited the anthology Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption , and is the author of Cooper's Lesson , a bilingual Korean/English illustrated book for children. She's received grants and fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and elsewhere. She lives in Minneapolis.

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Library Journal Review

"To many immigrants, exiles, and pseudo-exiles, back becomes.a hole surrounded by light." So says Korean American poet Shin (Rough, and Savage) in a bravura performance that combines scientific exegesis; prose poetry reflecting history, myth, and memoir; and viscerally vivid verse ("Your body all in flames-witch, bleach, blanch, stitch, torch, clutch")-all to capture the experience of the outsider arrived on our shores. Shin's writing, a dense, intensive spill of images that's nevertheless syntactically clear, moves from the immediate journey ("Vessel, your queer coffin" says a section using etymology to examine "The Hospitality of Strangers") to larger questions of self, consciousness, womanhood, and being in the world ("this prison is indeed the universe itself"). VERDICT A challenging book that will reward serious readers. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Library Journal Review

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