Find Me as the Creature I Am - by Emily Jungmin Yoon (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This is a Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf"--Title page verso.

Book Synopsis

From one of the sharpest up-and-coming voices in contemporary poetry, a stunning collection that explores our most fundamental instincts, capacity for affection, and the ways in which we resemble the wild

Find Me as the Creature I Am is a book full of tenderness and violence, longing and love. Ranging from inherited family tales to meditations on the body to animals' display of love and grief alike, Emily Jungmin Yoon holds up a mirror to humanity to show that we are animal, too. In poems full of wonder and want, she showcases our tendencies to fight or fly, act with affection and cruelty, and ultimately, overflow with life itself.

"And when I say we are beasts, / is that a metaphor?" Yoon asks, exploring how we--like language, like any creature--stem from our surroundings. Braiding together reflections about the natural world, family heritage, and adoration, Yoon shows that what passes between us--body to body, generation to generation--is what defines a life. Deeply felt and beautifully crafted, Find Me as the Creature I Am is a rapturous collection by a rising star in the poetry landscape.

Review Quotes

"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."
--Richie Hofmann, The Paris Review

"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, author of Time Is a Mother

"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, author of The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems

"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 skillful, meditative poems."
--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

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. 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 Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She splits her time between Honolulu and South Korea.