About this item
Highlights
- Who is guest, and who is host?
- About the Author: Sun Yung Shin is the author of poetry collections Rough, and Savage and Skirt Full of Black, which won an Asian American Literary Award.
- 112 Pages
- Literary Collections, Essays
Description
About the Book
Who is guest, and who is host? Adoption, Antigone, zombies, clones, and minotaurs--all building blocks, forming and reforming our ideas.Book Synopsis
Who is guest, and who is host? Adoption, Antigone, zombies, clones, and minotaurs--all building blocks, forming and reforming our ideas.Review Quotes
Winner of the 2017 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2017 PEN America Poetry Award
"The splendor on display in Shin's 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 Shin's Unbearable Splendor uses 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 into Unbearable 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 Splendor works on multiple levels. On perhaps its most obvious, superficial level, it's 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 machine--a 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. . . . Shin's 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 Shin's explorations are honest and unrestrained and show an enormous amount of skill. In spite of the gravity of the issues at hand, Unbearable Splendor comes 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 one's own humanity." --Jacket2
"While unabashedly scholarly, Unbearable Splendor is heartbreaking." --Star Tribune
"Shin's poetry is as cerebral as it is beautiful, explorin
About the Author
Sun Yung Shin is the author of poetry collections Rough, and Savage and Skirt Full of Black, which won an Asian American Literary Award. She co-edited the anthology Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and is the author of Cooper's Lesson, a bilingual Korean/English illustrated book for children. She's received grants and fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and elsewhere. She lives in Minneapolis.