From one of the sharpest up-and-coming voices in American poetry, a stunning collection that explores our most fundamental instincts, capacity for affection, and the ways 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 the ways animals display love and grief alike, Emily Jungmin Yoon holds a mirror up 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 the ways 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.
Preorder Find Me As the Creature I Am here. All proceeds go to Mohammed’s family.
“I can always depend on Yoon’s poems to achieve tenderness through an unbridled desire to flay history clean from its bones. Not only do these poems edify with knowledge, they’re also revelations of feeling, wonder, and resolve, traveling through routes circuitous and vexed as the finest essays. But most remarkable of all, they position love as a method, a mode of seeing and being, perhaps even a future. Bravo.”
-Ocean Vuong, author of Time Is a Mother
“In her remarkable new collection, Find Me as the Creature I Am, Emily Jungmin Yoon performs a linguistic sleight of hand to heighten our experience of what it means to be alive. ‘If we say only civilization can finish the world, does it mean to complete or destroy?’ Relying on the tensions between ambiguity and clarity, Yoon shows us that love and death can speak simultaneously. Readers are going to be captivated and captured by the magic of her poetry.”
-Kimiko Hahn, author of The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems
