Purchase Find Me As the Creature I Am here.
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.
Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes and A Cruelty Special to Our Species, a finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Yoon is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Ploughshares, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and The Sewanee Review. She is the poetry editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and assistant professor of Korean literature at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
“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
