Find Me As the Creature I Am

(Paperback, Main)

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From award-winning poet Emily Jungmin Yoon comes a luminous collection about family, nature and the intricacies of the self
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'Bravo' OCEAN VUONG
'Yoon's poems are a space where realities can co-linger, can be weighed and contemplated' PARIS REVIEW
'Readers are going to be captivated and captured by the magic of her poetry' KIMIKO HAHN
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Find Me as the Creature I Am is a book of tenderness and violence, longing and love. From inherited family tales to meditations on the body to animals' displays of love and grief, Emily Jungmin Yoon shows how entwined the human and animal worlds really are. In poems full of wonder and want, she illuminates our tendencies to fight or fly, act with affection and cruelty, and ultimately, overflow with life itself. Here, we see that what passes between us - body to body, generation to generation - is what defines a life.

Reviews

I can always depend on Yoon's poems to achieve tenderness through an unbridled desire to flay history clean from its bones. Not only do these poems edify with knowledge, they're also revelations of feeling, wonder, and resolve, traveling through routes circuitous and vexed as the finest essays. But most remarkable of all, they position love as a method, a mode of seeing and being, perhaps even a future. Bravo. -- Ocean Vuong
Yoon is an expert at cataloguing horrors: climate change, natural disasters, a ceaseless predilection for violence, racism, and intolerance, the pain of migration. But there's wonder and beauty here too. . . . [Find Me as the Creature I Am] includes some of the most beautiful wedding vows I've ever read, a charming poem about friendship among poets, and another about looking to the constellations, about feeling lonely and small, but being in the world together. [Yoon's] poems are a space where these realities can co-linger, can be weighed and contemplated. Cynicism never blots out the marvels; the marvels, in turn, never obscure the world of threat we all belong to * Paris Review *
In her remarkable new collection, Find Me as the Creature I Am, Emily Jungmin Yoon performs a linguistic sleight of hand to heighten our experience of what it means to be alive. 'If we say only civilization can finish the world, does it mean to complete or destroy' Relying on the tensions between ambiguity and clarity, Yoon shows us that love and death can speak simultaneously. Readers are going to be captivated and captured by the magic of her poetry. -- Kimiko Hahn
Wild, pastoral, and deeply patient, Yoon's beautiful third collection explores inherited family tales, the violence of love, and the complexities of the self's becoming. . . . These are skilful, meditative poems * Publishers Weekly *

Author Bio

EMILY JUNGMIN YOON is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes and A Cruelty Special to Our Species, a finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and winner of the 2019 Devil's Kitchen Reading Award in poetry. Yoon is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Ploughshares, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and The Sewanee Review. Yoon is the poetry editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and she is an assistant professor of Korean literature at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. She splits her time between Honolulu and South Korea.