Published in 2024
1 hour and 10 minutes
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.
What is this book about?
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.
