The Wet Hex

Reviews / Votes

Prasie for The Wet Hex

Winner of the 2023 Midland Authors Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry

"Revelatory. . . . Formally inventive. . . . These poems also project us into the future, using the past as a resource to create materials for survival." -Elizabeth Hoover, The Star Tribune

"Enthralling and fantastical. . . . [Shin] begs us to consider what equality looks like for all living things and how that might include the dead, engaging the spiritual, the mythical, and the animal world. While reaching into a variety of realms, from shamanism and funerary rites to the climate crisis and the inheritance of language, Shin's writing is tight and seamless." -Katya Buresh, BOMB Magazine

"There are many marvels to unpack in The Wet Hex. . . . Shin's lines glimmer and pop as they scrutinize the passage of time and the importance of legacy." -Diego Baez, Poetry Foundation

"[Shin's] spellbound language takes us through the hypnotic collaborative corridor between her sequential text and Jinny Yu drawings and profoundly translates its gender muteness into 'bark, seed, root, horn, organ, petal, oil, tea, tincture,' obedient materials of healing and transformation. The Wet Hex opens like a mountain, closes its glory with 'eros of self-sufficiency,' and is capable of turning the barren woman in you into a virgin or two stones." -Vi Khi Nao

"The Wet Hex is a worthy monument to this Holocene Epoch. Using images, allusions, and truths that are mystical, metaphorical, empirical, and personal, Sun Yung Shin prevails here as a daughter, and as a mother; these poems transcend our earthly realm like shadow children. Shin is a writer of profound skill and authentic presence. The Wet Hex is canorous, masterful, and utterly unique. It builds on her stellar body of work to advance what's possible in poetry and art." -Michael Kleber-Diggs

"Drop everything! Sun Yung Shin's new book has arrived: a rich biomythography, a feminist epic, a pilgrimage to the underworld. With tigers, wolves, lost ancestors, and sky, she stages encounters with death, afterbirth and afterlife, haunting/hunting. Who is the animal? What does the orphan dream? How does an abandoned princess raise the dead? Read these poems to find out. Here spells are cast. The hex drips wet. The castaways come home." -Gabrielle Civil

"The Wet Hex is a brilliant achievement seeking liberation for girls, women, orphans, and castaways. The poems interrogate violence in a haunting, gorgeous spell of lyric alchemy that only Sun Yung Shin can create. Shin 'let[s] the wolves out of [her] mouth' and charts a map for 'the fallen, the wandering, the abandoned.' Once again, she proves that she is a poet ahead of the curve, an intellectual and innovative wonder. This is one of my favorite poets. This is the most powerful book of poems I've read in years."-Lee Herrick