The Wet Hex - by Sun Yung Shin (Paperback)

About the Book

"Personal and environmental violations form the backdrop against which Sun Yung Shin examines questions of grievability, violence, and responsibility in The Wet Hex. Incorporating sources such as her own archival immigration documents, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Christopher Columbus' journals, and traditional Korean burial rituals, Shin explores the ways that lives are weighed and bartered. Smashing the hierarchies of god and humanity, heaven and hell, in favor of indigenous Korean shamanism and animism, The Wet Hex layers an apocalyptic revision of nineteenth-century imagery of the sublime over the present, conjuring a reality at once beautiful and terrible"--

Book Synopsis

• The Wet Hex is Sun Yung's fourth book of poetry with CHP. She is beloved and respected for her own award-winning writing as well as for her work as the editor of several anthologies, including A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press).
• Sun Yung co-leads Poetry Asylum with Su Hwang; there will be lots of opportunities for events and partnerships in the Twin Cities.
• Physical galleys will be available!

Review Quotes

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, 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 Báaacute;ez, 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 Baridegi's 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 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 prov

About the Author

Sun Yung Shin is a Korean-born poet, writer, collaborative artist, and bodyworker. She/they lives in Minneapolis.