The Wet Hex
5/5
()
About this ebook
- 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-leadsPoetry Asylum with Su Hwang; there will be lots of opportunities for events and partnerships in the Twin Cities.
- Physical galleys will be available!
Sun Yung Shin
신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin is a Korean American poet, fiction writer, nonfiction writer, editor, and educator. Her books include four collections of poetry: The Wet Hex (Coffee House Press, 2022); Unbearable Splendor (Coffee House Press, 2016, Minnesota Book Award winner); Rough, and Savage (Coffee House Press, 2012); and Skirt Full of Black (Coffee House Press, 2006, Asian American Literary Award). Her poetry has been supported with fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Residency, the Archibald Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. She lives in Minneapolis near Minnehaha Creek.
Read more from Sun Yung Shin
Unbearable Splendor Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Where We Come From Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to The Wet Hex
Related ebooks
Waterbaby Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Index of Haunted Houses Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Emporium Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Thresh & Hold Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Don't Go Back to Sleep Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5All the Blood Involved in Love Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Book of Endings Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Everything Must Go: The Life and Death of an American Neighborhood Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlood Dazzler: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Love, an Index Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Girls of Peculiar Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5When the Only Light Is Fire Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5To Be Named Something Else Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCeremony for the Choking Ghost: Poems by Karen Finneyfrock Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mad Honey Symposium Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Here is the Sweet Hand: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Thrown in the Throat Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unending Blues: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Doppelgangbanger Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Atrophy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLibrary of Small Catastrophes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Any Psalm You Want: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMother Body Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAngel Bones Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Love You Is Back Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Diamonds Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSpiking the Sucker Punch Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Poetry For You
The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Sun and Her Flowers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pretty Boys Are Poisonous: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Bell Jar: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPoems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Collection of Poems by Robert Frost Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Kids: An Autobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Thoughts: An Exploration Of Who We Are Beyond Our Minds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related categories
Reviews for The Wet Hex
1 rating0 reviews
Book preview
The Wet Hex - Sun Yung Shin
Also by Sun Yung Shin
Rough, and Savage
Skirt Full of Black
Unbearable Splendor
The
Wet Hex
SUN YUNG SHIN
Logo: Coffee House PressCopyright © 2022 by Sun Yung Shin
Cover design by Christina Vang
Drawings in section 3 © Jinny Yu
Book design by Bookmobile
Author photograph © David Boyer
Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].
Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Shin, Sun Yung, author.
Title: The wet hex / Sun Yung Shin.
Description: Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2022.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021059295 (print) | LCCN 2021059296 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566896382 (paperback) | ISBN 9781566896467 (epub)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3619.H575 W48 2022 (print) | LCC PS3619.H575 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6-dc23/eng/20211217
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059295
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059296
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Dedicated to those cast away.
… Praise our
mothers of lost habitats, mothers of fallout, mothers of extinction—pray for us—because even tomorrow will be haunted—leave them, leave us, leave—
—Craig Santos Perez, from Halloween in the Anthropocene, 2015
"And the priest shall write these curses in a book, and he shall blot them out with the bitter water: And he shall cause the woman to drink the bitter water that causeth the curse: and the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter."
—Numbers 5:23, Holy Bible, King James Version
Hex
meaning magic spell
was first recorded in 1909. Earlier it meant witch,
see hag,
meaning repulsive old woman
probably from Old English: hægtes, hægtesse witch, sorceress, enchantress, fury.
It is a word that has no male cognate.
CONTENTS
Translate This Body into Everything
(Section 1)
THERE IS / NEVER / ENOUGH
A Spade Is for Piercing the Ground and a Shovel Is for Heaving
Mines and Museums, or, the DMZ Is a Nature Preserve
Behind This Door Is a Siberian Tiger
An Orphan Receives Her Commercial DNA Test Results from Two Companies: An Abecedarian
Castaways in Paradise
History of Domestication
How an Animal Knows Where She Ends and You Begin
An Orphan Considers the Hand of God
(Section 2)
VIOLENCE IS NOT A METAPHOR
Botany of Death
Detonations
Bayonets and Bonfire
Specimens of Immortality
I Wandered into a Mass Extinction Event
He Said That We Should Turn Back
(Section 3)
THE UNDERWORLD HOLDS ALL TETHERS
Gaze _ Observatory _ Threshold: A 바리데기 Baridegi Reimagining
(Section 4)
FATE IS A DEBT
The Wolvish Forage
Unnatural Selection
A Black Box Theory of Descent
The Binding
Wheels of Misfortune
In the House of Moths
Our Country Laundered Us
(Section 5)
A WHITE FORKED FLAME
Sublime: Sailing Through a Midnight Sea
Whiteness: A Spell Thrown
Fish Scales All Over This Ark
Ravishing Migrations
Transit from Lintel to Lintel
My First Voyage Out
Tiger | Fade In, Fade Out
Evolution in the Underworld
Lullaby | Goodnight
Appendix
L’Etranger | An Unburial | A Funeral
Sources
Acknowledgments
Translate This Body into Everything
with thanks to Harryette Mullen
Here I am at the inconvenience
store of unspoken words. Rows of soft
silence. The produce
of our Korean families. Five thousand years
+
of the People in White. We are the girls
who went away, who left memory behind,
who ate pebbles and stopped talking.
We each need a librarian, an army of
+
alphabets to keep us warm at night,
when our voices stiffen to copper and tin.
When our grandmothers dissolve into mist
and our grandfathers mold wives out of dirt.
+
Here we are at the corner of the past and fate
no one discovered except