Find Me As the Creature I Am

Reviews / Votes

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 There is an unfiltered, confident sense of sincerity in Yoon's poetry * Guardian * 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 *