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Monica Youn's first UK collection is a powerful exploration of race, identity, and belonging, featuring prose, lyrical essays, and intense detail. She speaks truths without defensive irony, recasting classical myth in the light of coloniality, otherness, and desire. The poems juxtapose figures to elicit their deeper natures, offering thirteen ways of looking at a magpie.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 160 pages
Publication date: 25 May 2023
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd

A Publishers Weekly and New York Times Book of the Year, Monica Youn's debut UK collection is her fourth and most ambitious work. It concludes with prose, or at least with paragraphs, the long lyrical essay "In the Passive Voice," and the intense "Detail of the Rice Chest," explorations of race, identity, and belonging seldom so directly broached in poetry, though they are the unspoken theme of much of our silenced discourse. Monica Youn is an undefended poet, which is not the same as defenceless. On the contrary, the undefended poet speaks truths without defensive irony. When there is humour, it disarms the reader, until we too are undefended and can confront some of the themes we are reluctant to speak of. The poems recast classical myth in the light of coloniality, otherness, and desire, juxtaposing figures that elicit one another's deeper natures. There are metamorphoses, fables. In place of Wallace Stevens's blackbird, Youn proposes "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Magpie," the two-hued bird with a bad reputation.

Weight: 206g
Dimension: 134 x 216 x 15 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781800173644