신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin

Don't miss this special reading by David McCann, Koreanist and poet at Harvard

February 26, University of Minnesota, Consortium for the Study of the Asias

David McCann (from Harvard University's East Asian Studies Dept), Sun Yung Shin (reading from "Skirt Full of Black" and other poems), and Ed Bok Lee (reading from Real Karaoke People and new work)

7 pm, studio 100, Barbara Barker Center for Dance, U of Minnesota west bank. Free.

This Thursday 2/21 please sit by the fire with me at the Hamline Midway Library in St. Paul

Hi!

I hope folks can come to this special library reading--support public libraries (and their support of writers!)--I'll be reading a lot of new work, including a new longer series called Kingdom of the Light, Kingdom of the Dark, a persona poem in the voice of Satan--a meditation on the nature of authority and post-lapsarian eros. Plus it will be a balmy 18 degrees on Thursday--why not celebrate with some poetry?

Come keep me company. 

Here are the details:

1558 West Minnehaha Avenue

St. Paul, MN 55104

651-642-0293

branch.hamline@ci.stpaul.mn.us

Maps, Directions & Bus Routes

Five weeks of readings by some of Minnesota's acclaimed authors. Coffee, cookies, and cider provided

by Ginkgo Coffeehouse.

Supported by Micawber's Books and the Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library.Thursday, February 21 at 7 p.m.

Throughout Skirt Full of Black, Sun Yung Shin uses her cultural dualities as a Korean adoptee to create a new language for traversing the minefields of identity. Each poem in her resonant collection reveals the very personal consequences of the political, social and economic forces at work in the life of every adoptee.

Here was/is the rest of the series!

	Thursday, January 31 at 7 p.m. Poet, musician, essayist - Bill Holm is one of a kind. In Windows of Brimnes, his most ambitious book to date, he repairs to his cottage in Iceland to reflect on the state of our country today and what we might learn from the land of his ancestral roots.
	Thursday, February 7 at 7 p.m. Lise Erdrich’s first collection of stories, Night Train, offers a sharp-humored and powerful glimpse into rural communities and contemporary American Indian life and culture. Set in the small towns and reservations of northwestern Minnesota and western North Dakota, her lightning-quick tales capture the moment when the pressures of daily life collide with the insidiousness of history.
	Thursday, February 14 at 7 p.m. In search of contemporary Asian America, celebrated photographer Wing Young Huie - the only member of his family not born in China - traveled with his wife, Tara, through nearly forty states to explore and document the funny, touching, and sometimes strange intersection of Asian American and American cultures. Looking for Asian America illustrates their rich and surprising journey across the United States.
	Thursday, February 21 at 7 p.m. Throughout Skirt Full of Black, Sun Yung Shin uses her cultural dualities as a Korean adoptee to create a new language for traversing the minefields of identity. Each poem in her resonant collection reveals the very personal consequences of the political, social and economic forces at work in the life of every adoptee.
	Wednesday, February 27 at 7 p.m. Mary Logue returns to her acclaimed Claire Watson series with Maiden Rock, a tragic, personal follow up to Poison Heart. Claire’s daughter Meg is struggling with depression - after an all-night high school Halloween party, Meg’s best friend was found dead of an apparent suicide at the foot of Maiden Rock. Now Claire is faced with a growing trend in her rural town - meth labs, doped-up teenagers, and young girls just looking for a way to escape their small-town lives.

-1 degree right now in Minneapolis

Need I say more?

Beautifully written Vietnamese American coming-of-age novel

I think this would be an especially good book for younger high school readers...it's beautifully written, controlled, interior, moody...-sys

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Le's first novel is a bracing, unvarnished, elliptical account of a Vietnamese refugee family, in America but not yet of it, hobbled by an unfamiliar environment and their own troubled relationships. It's narrated by the family's young daughter, newly arrived in San Diego with her father after being sponsored by a well-meaning but condescending American family. Her mother soon joins them, and the family endures an itinerant existence of low-wage jobs and cheap rental apartments. Other Vietnamese wander namelessly through the book, sharing space with the family but providing little of the warmth of community. Nearly plotless, the novel is organized into vignettes that each feature one piercing image: a drunken parent, a shattered display cabinet, a drowned boy. As the narrator makes her halting adjustment to America, she also tries to discover what the family has left behind in Vietnam. Her father's mysterious past caused him to be rejected by his in-laws; these grandparents are now known to the girl only through a worn photograph. Then there is her brother, whose fate is mentioned only in whispers. Le allows no sentimentality to creep into this work-indeed, she hints only subtly at the narrator's emotional state ("there is no trace of blood anywhere except here, in my throat, where I am telling you all of this"), as though any explicit show of feeling were too frivolous for the subject at hand. This is a stark and significant work that will challenge readers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
The narrator of le's poetically spare but psychologically rich debut novel is only six when she and her father and four other Vietnamese men arrive in San Diego, thanks to a generous man who learned of the plight of Vietnamese boat people at church. Sadly, he dies before they arrive, leaving his widow and reluctant son to care for the refugees, an arrangement that ends with the sort of disaster only a lonely and imaginative child can create. Her mother was left behind in the confusion of their dangerous escape, and she also misses her dead older brother. Her mother finally joins them, but their lives remain unsettled, perplexing, even demoralizing in the face of undisguised prejudice and resentment. As le's narrator grows into adolescence, her perspective expands accordingly, illuminating not only her parents' passionate but violently troubled marriage, a much-objected-to union between a "Catholic schoolgirl from the South" and a "Buddhist gangster from the North," but also the many horrific and indelible psychic consequences of war. There is much pain in this exquisite novel, and much beauty. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Very lovely review of Skirt Full of Black

I was so happy and grateful to read this review from LUNA! Go read their journal! http://lunapoetry.blogspot.com/2007_12_01_archive.html

<blush>

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Review: Skirt Full of Black

Skirt Full of Black
SUN YUNG SHIN
Coffee House Press, $15


Transmogrifying Type


In Skirt Full of Black, Sun Yung Shin’s first collection of poetry, our expectation that the collection will entertain a meaningful and creative dialectic between American English and Korean languages is quickly and fruitfully complicated. It is true that almost all of Shin’s poems take language as at least part of their subject, but she is less concerned with a simple contrast of Korean versus English; rather, she is interested in some of the forms in which language manifests (oral, written, in typeface, as icon) and this leads her into a thematic and formal examination of the tension between spoken/written language, written/typed characters, and human/technological voices. She opens with, “MACRO-ALTAIC”:

“Sometimes even the surface forms defy etymology.”

In place of reading, two doors open
Away from each. Door—paper—door—

Because in her opening poem, a reader grasps the relationship between the textures of the first two voices readily and they stand in stark contrast, we might expect the two-voice formula to return to guide us through our reading of this maze-like collection where conjoined twins split and reform, human typewriters work in pork-processing plants and enormous flowers budding petals of countless histories shake loose one message at a time. The first voice, the one in quotes, reads like an out-of-date textbook on how to translate (Korean into English?) but as easily it could be something else (maybe a primer on structural sociology?), but in “MACRO-ALTAIC,” and throughout the collection, Shin does not acknowledge where she cribs the quoted voices or if she is cribbing at all We can call this first voice the “textbook voice,” to help us keep things straight. The second voice, the “poetic voice,” is the image-driven voice that we encounter often. A few lines later, in the same poem:

“Korean contrast structurally with European languages such as English in a number of ways.”

Your sister’s spirit escapes through a pinprick in the paper wall.
The shaman kneels at her side as before a meal.

In the first poem we can begin to understand how the images created in Shin’s more poetic voice operate with the textbook voice. This makes for an engaging play. Anyone who spends time though with Skirt Full of Black, will come to realize that Shin is interested in this play for about three pages.

The poems that follow build on the concept of multiple textures set-up by the first poem in increasingly alarming and rewarding ways. Images fly out of control, across time periods and continents and voices intermingle to the point of assimilation. In the second poem, “KUAI-ZI,” both voices from the first poem return in similar typographic manifestations (“poetic voice” and “textbook voice”), but other voices show up here to complicate the picture. Now we have a voice that appears in italics and dialogue. This voice reminds us of prose fiction and fairytale:

“We are cannibals,” said a man to his wife, in a picture. He took a picture of the page of words and saved it for processing later.

We also have a kind of bold, capitalized computer print-out voice interspersed:

THIS PERSON IS THE “STICKER,” HIS JOB IS TO SLIT THE THROATS OF THE COWS AS THEY PASS BY ON THE ASEMBLY LINE.

or

THIS IS THE “KNOCKER,” ADMINISTERING THE STUN BOLT TO THE COW’S BRAIN.

And additionally we have the complication of the earlier voices; that is, they are unstable, they do not return and sound the same. They assume different postures. This voice falls somewhere between “poetic” and “textbook”:

Chinese chopstick, called kua-zi (quick little fellow with bamboo heads) are nine to ten inches long and rectangular with a blunt end.

And I think we have at least a second textbook as well to end the poem:

“Each soldier is an individual.”

I focus on the style and font to lead us to content. Over time, a reader might be tempted to expect certain things when they see a certain style font appear on the page, but a reader with those expectations will be quickly disappointed, because Shin adapts the fonts and styles on a per poem basis. The bold, capitalized computer print-out voice returns in the next poem only to reveal itself as the voice of a very specific typewriter that is important to the collection as a whole. As readers, we begin to understand the necessity of a multiplicity:

By the 1920s, virtually all typewrites were “look-alikes”

only in capital letter: QWERTY: WOMAN TYPING: HARD RETURN
(Shin from “OBVIOUSLY, THESE WERE HOMES…”)

We should not say there are four or even eight different voices at work in Skirt Full of Black; rather there are four or eight or sometimes ten different voices at work in a single poem. Take the book’s longer poem (almost all of section 2), “FLOWER, I, STAME AND POLLEN” for example. Here we see a plethora of styles and voices, from lists to imperatives, stories to truncated lyrics, historical allegory and rules and, perhaps, one might even say, a good old prose poem, but that comes along with a kind of asterisk dance that is dangerously close to a linguistic expression…

The beauty of this book is that we are always slipping into new forms and new styles with and within each poem. Never too far away though is Shin’s disarming poetic. One is reminded of a book like Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, by Marilyn Chin. On the jacket Chin describes Skirt Full of Black in relation to form, things like “collage of ancient fragments” and “catalogue of associative statements;” but these comments I think do not acknowledge the rigor of this project and how seriously Shin’s poems feel rooted in their new and challenging forms. The poems themselves are visual landscapes, typographically speaking, and they are very controlled compositions. On the cover: a monochromatic orange typewriter on baby blue background, where from a sheer dark gray sky letters rain either out from or into the typewriter and solid, in a yellow sheet of paper feeding out from the typewriter, we see the title and the author. The typewriter is a guide throughout the book, a control mechanism, that lets us know our language and our space, however unharnessed it may seem, has been mitigated. The typewriter provides also an early touchstone for some of the other kinds of control.

All Shin’s titles appear in bold capital letters, which kind of loom over the poems as signposts. They do not feel oppressive in their looming though, authoritative yes, but rather like things to take note of on your way by into the body of the poem. Sometimes they are a single word and sometimes we come across something like this as a title:

OBVIOUSLY, THESE WERE HOMES RATHER THAN OFFICE MACHINE, MEANT FOR PEOPLE OF LIMITED MEANS WHO NEEDED TO DO SOME OCCASIONAL TYPING

About two-thirds of the way though the book we find a table of the Korean alphabet, divided into vowels and consonants, with Korean symbols and English equivalents. This table guides us through the penultimate section of the book where we find spare, delicate poems that seem to center around uniformly one-word titles the table invites us to translate and speak. With the introduction of this table, we settle down, the page becomes less crowded and more of a portrait than a landscape. We see in this penultimate section and as well in the last, that there is indeed a place for elegy in the collection. We find poems like “LEFTOVERS,” that have a more typical contemporary American poetic:

“I’m a Gay Dad”
T-shirt on a young Korean man
Holding hands lightly with his girlfriend

“Pity, all of this Westernization”

The English language is true
Nonsense, everywhere

And “WORSHIP”:

There is a prime number
That begs to be reduced

Resist the beggars
They have no rights

Is this Mass the same everywhere there is God
Even though different people eat differently

When we reach the end of Skirt Full of Black, we do find ourselves asking the question: what is total work of the book? What have I just been through and what has it asked of me? Did I pass the test?

We also find ourselves wondering, what would have happened should we have ended still at the mercy of the out-of-control-many-voiced typewriter? If Shin had pushed us to the brink and never calmed down? Or conversely, what if the Korean alphabet opened the book, grounding us in that aspect of the project?

Part of what a reader walks away with is the idea of the ambidextrous voice: a voice that understands space and time are dangerously out of control in the most sublime sense and can reflect that; a voice that can distill space and time into beautiful, abstract, tight-knit impressions that challenge the relationship between American English and Korean, language and sound. Shin understands we all share a lingua mater, there is no indivisible sound in any language; she dedicates the collection to “the worldwide Korean diaspora—six to seven million overseas Koreans living in 140 countries.” As I walk away from this collection, I take with me a sense from one of the Siamese twin poems in the middle of the collection, “THAT CAME TO BE SPLIT INTO A PLURALITY,” where Shin’s ideas of twinning, conjoined twins, adoption, and linguistics come to a head in the imbalance and symmetry between two simple statements:

That we each have a number assigned to us

and:

That we each have a name, or three assigned to us

by Thomas Cook

The Irrepressible Sherry Quan Lee to mentor again! Don't miss this!

MINNESOTA POETS LOOKING FOR A MENTOR & PEERS, SIGN UP NOW!

SPRING 2008 WRITER-TO-WRITER APPLICATIONS STILL  AVAILABLE!
EXTENDED Deadline to Apply: February 20, 2008

Calling all writers! Applications are now available for our spring
session of Writer-to-Writer, the artistic mentorship program designed
to give advanced writers the opportunity to reach their next level of
artistic development. Writer-to-Writer creates intimate relationships
between artists; mentors act as artistic catalysts and partners,
providing each mentee with artistic feedback and professional guidance.

WRITER-TO-WRITER: SPRING 2008 MENTORSHIPS:

Anya Achtenberg (fiction/memoir)
DISCOVERING THE UNLIVED LIFE:
WRITING INTO THE MYSTERY OF YOUR CHARACTERS
The work of character development is central to discovering the real
story, rather than imposing a story onto our characters. Full
development of character in story work is not separate from the real
work we do in the world, that of continually crossing borders—internal
as well as external—with openness and knowledge, compassion and
respect. For our characters to unfold their truths in their full
dignity or brokenness, their astonishing beauty or cruelty, we must
work to understand their deepest yearnings in a way that often goes
beyond their own ability to articulate them.

In this mentorship, each participant will agree to “live with” one or
two characters for the duration of the mentorship, although new
characters may emerge, and new dimensions open of other, perhaps less
central, characters. We will work to deepen our ability to bring the
power of authentic beings into our writing, and extend our range to
include characters we may dislike or fear, characters that puzzle or
fascinate us, as well as those with whom we identify. We will challenge
ourselves to go beyond our preconceived notions, our projections of our
own points of view, our societal and cultural biases, our fear and lack
of knowledge, into understanding the lives of others in our global
community, in our own neighborhood or family.

We will go beyond the back story, beyond what a character has lived up
to the moment that we meet them. An unlived life is hidden within the
life each character must live to get by. You will explore your
character’s internal terrain, a land of yearning bordered by
frustration, overwork, social pressures, forgetting, distractions, and
violences, large and small, yet charged by the deep human desire for
expression and connection, for fulfillment of the individual and social
self in creativity and community. We will look at these evocative and
emotional issues in our discussions and in the illuminating work of
diverse writers. We’ll work in far-reaching but focused writing
explorations to cross boundaries that not only free our writing, but
deepen our understanding of, and respect for, the worlds and characters
we write about.

Sherry Quan Lee (poetry)
Bookmaking: Writing to Save Your Life
What does the map of your life look like? Are there stop signs,
detours, back roads, freeways, and tunnels?  Do you travel one
particular road over and over again?  Are you writing that one story
over and over again?  Does your collection of stories need closure?  Is
closure possible?

Memoir can be the stories remembered and made sense of as you chart the
map of your life.  Memoir can be the connection, the collection of
those stories.  Memoir can be your stories written in poetic form.
Memoir can be poetry enhanced with pictures, and other visual
materials.

In this mentorship, we will explore the healing power of poetry as
memoir. Initially, we will examine the stories that navigate your life
in order to discover the theme of your memoir.  Your theme will be your
writing prompt to gather more material. We will discuss poems belonging
in your book, but emphasis will be on overall theme, organization,
format, and production.  This mentorship is for poets (who may
sometimes write prose) interested in completing a chapbook or
manuscript draft.
* * * * * * * * *

Read more about our Spring mentorships with Anya Achtenberg
(fiction/memoir) and Sherry Quan Lee (poetry) online here:
http://www.intermediaarts.org/pages/programs/literary/wtw.php.
Applications attached, and available online!

This program is supported by the Jerome Foundation in celebration of
the Jerome Hill Centennial and in recognition of the valuable cultural
contributions of artists to society.

Totally hard-boiled reading pleasure! Book of the-last-evening

ABOUT THIS BOOK

A serial cop-killer is running rampant in Tokyo's Shinjuku ward and only one man has the connections and the courage to find and stop him -- The Shark. Filled with volatile characters, each wiht his own unique ties, Shinjuku Shark is a masterpiece of nonstop tension.

Arimasa Osawa is one of Japan's leading hardboiled novelists, influenced by American authors such as Elmore Leonard. His famous work, Shinjuku Shark (the first installment in a series) won the Eiji Yoshikawa Award for fiction and the Naoki Prize.

About the Author

Arimasa Osawa was born in 1956 in Nagoya. After dropping out of Keio University, he dove head first into fiction writing, winning the First Detective Fiction Award in 1979 for his first novel, The Sentimental Street Corner. In 1991, he won the Eiji Yoshikawa Award and Japan Mystery Writers Association Award, and in 1993, the Naoki Award, all for installments in the Shinjuku Shark series.

Angela Davis coming to Macalester on 2/13

http://www.macalester.edu/whatshappening/speakseries/davis.html

mac sources     quick facts     macalester podcasts     archives     search

Directions to Macalester               Lealtad Suzuki Center                   • Angela Davis Biography       • Professor Duchess Harris Biography                        DON'T MISS         Angela Davis           A Socially Conscious Conversation             with the Legendary Activist           5 p.m., February 13           Alexander G. Hill Ballroom           View a poster for the event»         This event is free; however,           tickets will be required           and available for pick up           at the Campus Center           Information Desk beginning           on February 6 for students and February 8 for the general public.             ANGELA DAVIS     Through her activism and her scholarship over      the last decades, Angela Davis has been deeply      involved in our nation’s quest for social justice.  She is the author of eight books and has lectured  throughout the world.  She has spent the last fifteen  years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is Professor of History of Consciousness,  an interdisciplinary Ph.D program, and Professor of  Feminist Studies.  In recent years, a persistent theme  of her work has been the range of social problems  associated with incarceration and the generalized  criminalization of those communities that are most  affected by poverty and racial discrimination.  She draws upon her own experiences in the early  seventies as a person who spent eighteen months  in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s  “Ten Most Wanted List.” Her most recent books are  Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete?  She is now completing a new book, Prisons and  American History.   Angela Davis is a member of the executive     board of the Women of Color Resource Center, a San      Francisco Bay Area organization that emphasizes      popular education of and about women who live      in conditions of poverty. She also works with Justice      Now, which provides legal assistance to women in      prison and engages in advocacy for the abolition      of imprisonment as the dominant strategy for      addressing social problems. Internationally, she is      affiliated with Sisters Inside, a similar organization     based in Queensland, Australia.   Sponsored by the Lealtad-Suzuki Center, Program Board, The President’s Office, American Studies, MCSG, Center for Religious & Spiritual Life, and Academic Programs.     Contact     Karla Benson Rutten or Tinbete Ermyas ‘08, SPEAK Organizers

Comments and questions to webmaster@macalester.edu
Macalester College · 1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105 · 651-696-6000

 

El Orfanato

This was a good movie--I recommend it! It uses a lot of contemporary horror conventions and/but they work; I also see it as an inheritor of The Omen...it's earthy, scary, moving...a somewhat problematic narrative of The Mother archetype...but still very worth seeing. A beautiful film.

I have some new poems in Coconut 11...

Coconut Eleven—featuring new poems by Liz Waldner, Carla Harryman, Dorothea Lasky, Chris Pusateri, Peter Davis, Melissa Benham, Amber Nelson, Kismet Al-Hussaini, Kathleen Rooney & Elisa Gabbert, Anna Fulford, Marco Giovenale, Michael Sikkema, Sun Yung Shin, Maureen Thorson, Jordan Davis, Mara Vahratian, Philip Metres, Janet Holmes, Fritz Ward, Susan Scarlata, Jeni Olin, Jon Link, and Rebecca Hazelton—is now live on the web.

Thanks for the shout-out from the blog Hitler's Mustache!