From from Poems

Youn deconstructs in her piercing fourth collection (after Blackacre) Asian American identity to examine its many fragments. "Revealing a racial marker in a poem is like revealing a gun in a story or like/ revealing a nipple in a dance," Youn writes in the opening poem, "Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë / Sado)," establishing the tone of the inquiring and powerful pages that follow. In "Deracinations: Eight Sonigrams," Youn dissects her childhood and young adulthood, recalling the encoded colonialism in Curious George books, being subjected to racial slurs by a bully, and searching fruitlessly for other Asian poets to emulate, "seeking/ a racial exemplar, an icon." Youn demonstrates a mastery of the existential, declaring perceptively in "Study of Two Figures (Midas / Marigold)" that "Death is a wish to improve one's surroundings./ Which is to say to be dissatisfied with one's surroundings is a form of death." The long prose poem, "In the Passive Voice," is a virtuosic performance addressing, among other subjects, the challenges of maintaining racial solidarity under capitalism. Intimate yet expansive, Youn's poems bring remarkable depth, candor, and intensity to personal and social history. (Mar.)

In her fourth collection, Youn--a National Book Award finalist for Ignatz and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for Blackacre--incorporates historical figures and cultural tropes as she explores identity and the search for self. (The title comes from the question so often asked of Asian Americans, "Where are you from…? No--where are you from from?" From a multiple-poem study of the magpie, a traditional symbol of good news in Korea considered bad luck in Europe, she moves to a prose poem about the recent, alarming rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans, juxtaposed against the backdrop of a beach community whose white residents search for shark teeth. In "Deracinations: Eight Sonigrams," Youn develops the sonigram form, in which the letters and sound of a word are omnipresent, causing the poem to "inhabit the sonic landscape of a particular word." Here, the poem follows the speaker through their childhood, from being read Curious George by her mother, to her introduction to Korean soap operas on VHS tapes, to enduring racist slurs and remarks from classmates. VERDICT Youn does an extraordinary job of blending historical themes with haunting modern-day experiences to clarify sense of self. Readers will be captivated.--Sarah Michaelis