From From
Published on 25. May 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
160 pages
978-1-80017-364-4 (ISBN)
Description
A Publishers Weekly and New York Times Book of the Year.
Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry 2023.
Monica Youn's first UK collection is her fourth and most ambitious book. It ends with prose, or at least with paragraphs, the long lyrical essay 'In the Passive Voice', and the intense 'Detail of the Rice Chest', explorations of race, identity and belonging seldom so directly broached in poetry, though they are the unspoken theme of much of our silenced discourse. Monica Youn is an undefended poet, which is not the same thing as defenceless. On the contrary, the undefended poet speaks truths without defensive irony. When there is humour it disarms the reader, until we too are undefended and can confront some of the themes we are reluctant to speak of.
The poems recast classical myth in the light of coloniality, otherness and desire, juxtaposing figures which elicit one another's deeper natures. There are metamorphoses, fables. In place of Wallace Stevens's blackbird, Youn proposes 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Magpie', the two-hued bird with a bad reputation.
Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry 2023.
Monica Youn's first UK collection is her fourth and most ambitious book. It ends with prose, or at least with paragraphs, the long lyrical essay 'In the Passive Voice', and the intense 'Detail of the Rice Chest', explorations of race, identity and belonging seldom so directly broached in poetry, though they are the unspoken theme of much of our silenced discourse. Monica Youn is an undefended poet, which is not the same thing as defenceless. On the contrary, the undefended poet speaks truths without defensive irony. When there is humour it disarms the reader, until we too are undefended and can confront some of the themes we are reluctant to speak of.
The poems recast classical myth in the light of coloniality, otherness and desire, juxtaposing figures which elicit one another's deeper natures. There are metamorphoses, fables. In place of Wallace Stevens's blackbird, Youn proposes 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Magpie', the two-hued bird with a bad reputation.
Reviews / Votes
'From From is equal parts comic and tragic, clinical and wrenching. Monica Youn's parables and studies are devastating meditations on the sadism of whiteness and the abjection of racial containment. From the personal, to Du Soon Ja, to beloved icons like Dr Seuss, Youn examines how complicity gestates and develops, how unexamined desire and fear lead to the hatred of the other and oneself while yanking up the roots of words to unearth the hidden biases built into the way we speak. [...] From From is unforgiving and horrifying, singular and absolutely extraordinary.' - Cathy Park Hong; 'In reflecting and refracting the fantasies and absurdities, dark secrets and blatant cruelties by which American racism invents and maintains itself, Youn counters our brutal imagination with flammable, superior dreams.' - New York TimesMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Carcanet Press Ltd
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 135 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
215 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80017-364-4 (9781800173644)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Monica Youn grew up in Houston, the daughter of Korean immigrants, and now splits her time between Brooklyn and Southern California, where she is an associate professor of English at UC Irvine. Her previous poetry collections are Blackacre (2016), Ignatz (2010), and Barter (2003). She has been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship among other honors. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kingsley Tufts Award, and the PEN Open Book Award. She is a former constitutional lawyer and a member of the curatorial collective the Racial Imaginary Institute.