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, 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, Shins writing is tight and seamless. Katya Buresh, BOMB Magazine
There are many marvels to unpack in The Wet Hex. . . . Shins lines glimmer and pop as they scrutinize the passage of time and the importance of legacy. Diego Baez, Poetry Foundation
The Wet Hex,born out of the frugal feline year of Korean myths, modernizes and bewitches us with her transfixed vertical, etymological discourse on everything beguiling: fate, moth, white, shaman, casket, box, moon, flower, death. Grief is a heated iron comb, which Sun Yung Shin uses to biblically curl your pelagic feline form into gaze, debt, heritage, and threshold. Sun Yung Shin is an enchantress. Sun Yung Shin is oil, resin, feather. Sun Yung Shin is a lexical, chthonic tiger, enraptured specimen of poetic inheritance, roaring from her Minnesota wilderness into the uninhabited, forgiving, concerted retelling of Baridegis heroism. Her 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 Hexopens 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 Shins 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 Ive read in years. Lee Herrick
Praise forUnbearable Splendor:
Winner of the 2017 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2017 PEN America Poetry Award
The splendor on display in Shins book consists of an incredibly compact use of commanding and vibrant language, which coheres into work that feels restless and deft, as cerebral as it is emotional.Los Angeles Review of Books
Like a lean, mean, efficient literary machine, Sun Yung ShinsUnbearable Splendoruses its hybrid nature to arrive on bookshelves as something very true, heartbreaking, and, ultimately, unbearably human.Chicago Review of Books
One of the primary concerns of this book is the self; paradoxically, Sun Yung Shin is able to explore this theme with both a microscope and a telescope, and the result is a heady, multidimensional and multi-textured read.The Corresponder
It is a blessing that Sun Yung Shin has written a great deal of sound intoUnbearable Splendor, because we have not heard or seen or read anything like this before, a truly unique, essential, and original collection.NewPages
These constant reminders of surreal wonderment do their work like little ice picks, chipping away at the grand event of colonized hurt. The results are small, perceptible feelings you could almost hold in your hand.Waxwing
As a book,Unbearable Splendorworks on multiple levels. On perhaps its most obvious, superficial level, its a text full of beautiful, haunting, lyrical language and interconnected themes that wind in and out of each other to weave a coherent fabric of many strands. Under that surface, though, lives a veritable dissertation (with plenty of angles that the reader can research) on otherness and transgression, and in turn, on how what or who that is other, or what or who that transgresses, problematizes the existence of the one who observes.Drunken Boat
In poems traversing that canny valley between verse and prose, Shin draws on cinema, technology, mythology, sci fi, autobiography and folklore to unlock the titular emotion: the unbearableness of the labyrinth, the splendor of being a machinea hybrid, a replicant, an orphan.The Rumpus
From this investigation of cloning, cyborgs, surrogacy, and adoption, Shin weaves a narrative of language and history that represents a striking new way of understanding identity.Lantern Review
In a striking interweaving of poetry and essay, etymologies brush up against adoption certificates, and quotations jostle with myths. . . . Shins resistance to offering a definitive answer allows her to make connections that are sometimes dizzying, often lyrical, and always thought provoking.The Missing Slate
Sun Yung Shins explorations are honest and unrestrained and show an enormous amount of skill. In spite of the gravity of the issues at hand,Unbearable Splendorcomes from a writer at play, and she never lets us forget how much pleasure there is to be found in language.Front Porch Journal
[Unbearable Splendor] is a project of reclamation of ones own humanity.Jacket2
While unabashedly scholarly,Unbearable Splendoris heartbreaking.Star Tribune
Shins poetry is as cerebral as it is beautiful, exploring the personal experiences of race, immigration, and gender alongside academic investigations of religion and science, philosophy and art.Bustle
In Sun Yung Shins gifted hands, cyborgs become the mechanism by which to examine the self, humanity, and the individuals place in an automated world.Signature
At once sensual, philosophical, mind-bending in its juxtapositions, Shins exploration of what we take for grantedbodies, labels, time, and what it means to be humancrosses many intellectual landscapes at once. . . .Unbearable Splendoris a liminal book, but one that invites the reader to cross all its boundaries.International Examiner
Unlike your more vanilla essay collections, this work uses poetic building blocks to slowly reveal the existentialist heart, a very impressive result as the personal connection is palpable.Messengers Booker
Ive long thought that Sun Yung Shin is writing some of the most powerful poetry around.Eileen Verbs Books
To graph the immigrant, the exile and pseudo-exile, as a kind of star. To perform childhood. Descent upon descent. To write on [p]aper soaked in milk.Unbearable Splendoris a book like this, that is this: the opposite or near-far of home. What is the difference between a guest and a ghost? What will you feed them in turn? I was profoundly moved by the questions and deep bits of feeling in this gorgeous, sensing work, and am honored to write in support of its extraordinary and brilliant writer, Sun Yung Shin.Bhanu Kapil
InUnbearable Splendor,Sun Yung Shin sticks a pin directly into the heart of who we are to reveal that a person is a mystery without beginning or end, borders or documents, complicated by robotics and astrophysics, arrivals and departures, myth and rewriting. A person is divided into multiple, complicated selves, as various and complex as the forms and approaches she employs in these poetic essays. To read Shins work is to marvel at a rosebuds concealed and silent core and to slowly witness its elegant blooming. It is a delicate and majestic show.Jenny Boully
Unbearable Splendoris a dazzling collage of biophysical metamorphoses, wherein the I atomizes into multiple and self-replicating new mythologies of what constitutes an authentic being. I didnt know I wasnt human. My past was invented, implanted, and accepted. Im more real than you are because I know Im not real. In our vast expanse, where every species is transitional, Shins lyricism, erudition, and tonal command of loss and indignation harmonize into a singular nucleus that hums and pulsates through each of these wondrous poetic meditations.Ed Bok Lee
Into the fertile and ever-growing landscape of essay-poem hybrids comes Sun Yung Shins striking exploration of identity, imitation, and home. From the uncanny valley to the minotaurs labyrinth, Shin brings an unflagging intelligence and tremendous formal dexterity to bear on what makes us human and what makes us monstrouswe so often fall somewhere in between.Mairead Small Staid, Literati Bookstore
In examining her own search of identity, Shin masterfully uses the likes of Antigone, Korean history, cyborgs, black holes, clones to bridge this Uncanny Valley. This is brilliantly done and is often as mind-bending as it is heart-wrenching.Unabridged Bookstore
Like a dream intent on processing ones daily struggles in the most abstract of ways,Unbearable Splendorkneads and stretches the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, realism and SF, with the experience of a Korean orphan-turned-American immigrant being central to the experiment.Strange Horizons
