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Sun Yung Shin is the author of poetry collections Rough, and Savage and Skirt Full of Black, which won an Asian American Literary Award. She co-edited the anthology Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and is the author of Cooper's Lesson, a bilingual Korean/English illustrated book for children. She's received grants and fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and elsewhere. She lives in Minneapolis.
In poems traversing that canny valley between verse and prose, Shin draws on cinema, technology, mythology, sci fi, autobiography and folklore to unlock the titular emotion: the unbearableness of the labyrinth, the splendor of being a machine--a hybrid, a replicant, an orphan. --The Rumpus Shin's poetry is as cerebral as it is beautiful, exploring the personal experiences of race, immigration, and gender alongside academic investigations of religion and science, philosophy and art. --Bustle I've long thought that Sun Yung Shin is writing some of the most powerful poetry around. --Eileen Verbs Books To graph the immigrant, the exile and 'pseudo-exile,' as 'a kind of star.' To perform childhood. 'Descent upon descent.' To write on '[p]aper soaked in milk.' Unbearable Splendor is a book like this, that is this: the opposite or near-far of home. What is the difference between a guest and a ghost? What will you feed them in turn? I was profoundly moved by the questions and deep bits of feeling in this gorgeous, sensing work, and am honored to write in support of its extraordinary and brilliant writer, Sun Yung Shin. --Bhanu Kapil In Unbearable Splendor, Sun Yung Shin sticks a pin directly into the heart of who we are to reveal that a person is a mystery without beginning or end, borders or documents, complicated by robotics and astrophysics, arrivals and departures, myth and rewriting. A person is divided into multiple, complicated selves, as various and complex as the forms and approaches she employs in these poetic essays. To read Shin's work is to marvel at a rosebud's concealed and silent core and to slowly witness its elegant blooming. It is a delicate and majestic show. --Jenny Boully Unbearable Splendor is a dazzling collage of biophysical metamorphoses, wherein the 'I' atomizes into multiple and self-replicating new mythologies of what constitutes an authentic being. 'I didn't know I wasn't human. My past was invented, implanted, and accepted. I'm more real than you are because I know I'm not real.' In our vast expanse, where 'every species is transitional,' Shin's lyricism, erudition, and tonal command of loss and indignation harmonize into a singular nucleus that hums and pulsates through each of these wondrous poetic meditations. --Ed Bok Lee
