UNBEARABLE SPLENDOR
Winner of the 2017 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2017 PEN America Poetry Award
Who is guest, and who is host? Adoption, Antigone, zombies, clones, and minotaurs — all building blocks, forming and reforming our ideas. Poetry as essay, as a way of hovering over the uncanny, sci-fi orientalism, Antigone, cyborgs, Borges, disobedience.
Sun Yung Shin moves ideas around like building blocks, forming and reforming new constructions of what it means to be guest, to be host. How to be at home.
October 2016, Coffee House Press
112 pages, ISBN: 978-1566894517
UNBEARABLE SPLENDOR
Winner of the 2017 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2017 PEN America Poetry Award
Who is guest, and who is host? Adoption, Antigone, zombies, clones, and minotaurs — all building blocks, forming and reforming our ideas. Poetry as essay, as a way of hovering over the uncanny, sci-fi orientalism, Antigone, cyborgs, Borges, disobedience.
Sun Yung Shin moves ideas around like building blocks, forming and reforming new constructions of what it means to be guest, to be host. How to be at home.
October 2016
Coffee House Press
112 pages
ISBN: 978-1566894517
PRESS + MEDIA
“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
“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
Transgression, Transcendence, and Identity in Sun Yung Shin’s Unbearable Splendor, by Jenny Drai on Medium
“Like a dream intent on processing one’s daily struggles in the most abstract of ways, Unbearable Splendor kneads and stretches the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, realism and SF, with the experience of a Korean orphan-turned-American immigrant being central to the experiment.” —Strange Horizons
“While unabashedly scholarly, Unbearable Splendor is heartbreaking.” —Star Tribune
“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
“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
“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
“Shin’s poetry is as cerebral as it is beautiful, exploring the personal experiences of race, immigration, and gender alongside academic investigations of religion and science, philosophy and art.” —Bustle
“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
“At once sensual, philosophical, mind-bending in its juxtapositions, Shin’s exploration of what we take for granted—bodies, labels, time, and what it means to be human—crosses many intellectual landscapes at once. . . . Unbearable Splendor is a liminal book, but one that invites the reader to cross all its boundaries.” —International Examiner
HORN! REVIEWS: Unbearable Splendor, by Kevin Thomas in The Rumpus
“I’ve long thought that Sun Yung Shin is writing some of the most powerful poetry around.” —Eileen Verbs Books