A blog of fragments.
Emily Jungmin Yoon’s second full-length collection, Find Me as the Creature I Am, is an archive of intimacy and love. While Yoon’s earlier work focuses on (re)encountering the imperial and gendered violence of the Japanese occupation of Korea and their sexual enslavement of Korean women — along with the enduring legacies of racialized and gendered violence that Yoon faces in her own life — her latest collection is addressed to a variety of intimate others that keep her speakers in complex relation to her embodied life and positionality as a Korean, Asian, and Asian American.
While her earlier Ordinary Misfortunes poems used testimony from surviving Korean comfort women as material for witnessing a subjugated history (in a Foucauldian sense) of imperial violences obfuscated by convenient forgetting and the superficial performance of diplomatic reconciliation between the Korean and Japanese governments, Find Me as the Creature I Am takes as its epicenter a contemporary love that can hope to retrieve and imagine better histories, presents, and futures. In “Vow,” love is both the mooring of starting out (“I love you; I don’t know how to begin”) and end point, already evident but needing to be elaborated and recounted to the loved one. Yet Yoon’s work nuances love as not a purely clarifying or evident force. “In all the futures” is a “selfish” plea to “labor to hope,” for futures where a loved one is kept impossibly alive: “In all the futures I am capable of praying for, / you are not alone—you are alive.”
At its most sophisticated, Yoon’s poetry refracts love across history, family, and species. “All my friends who loved trees are dead” reckons with the expansive legacy of love, poetry, and loss left behind by the speaker’s grandmother. The speaker’s difficulty in coming to terms with the loss of their grandmother traverses all kinds of inheritances: biological/familial (“her children and their children” are the ones who “tuck her into the earth”), her passions and ambitions like watching medical shows and traveling the world, and the trees she left behind. To ward off the immediacy of her grandmother’s death, the speaker strolls through the Field Museum’s exhibit of birds, itself predicated on bodily violence: “Audubon went through great troubles, observing them flying / and looking after their young, then somehow, / killed these birds.”
The violence of preservation for exhibition presents an alternate terrain that the speaker can enter to begin processing their loss. As the speaker strolls into another exhibition where they “see more animals / who loved trees, who died to pretend / in a taxidermy wing in Chicago,” the speaker texts a friend that they cannot let go of their grandmother, prompting the response, “Why do you have to let her go?” The difficulties of holding onto the shape of a lost loved one, and the ethical dimensions of remembrance, are complexly underscored by the exhibits the speaker finds themselves walking through. By introducing this nonhuman element, Yoon opens a multifaceted exploration of the mystery of being left behind, of the pressures and violences of holding on and letting go.
In one of the collection’s standout poems, “Body Of,” Yoon underscores the multiplicitous pressures exerted upon the body, a material that offers no easy recourse in self-reflexivity or self-possession. From her mother teaching her to protect her body by insisting on its reproductive capabilities (“when a man touches you here, yell, I am a body / that will bear a child”) to the bodies thrown “across oceans, across lands,” the poem surveys a litany of bodily impositions until interrupted by a declaration of love: “Friends, I am just now ready to love my own.” Far from an untroubled assertion of self-possession, the poem locates the speaker in “this land in which I still bleed, / this land in which I give up / something every day,” leaving the reader with a marred, variegated tapestry of embodiedness awash with overlapping violences yet never dominated by them, instead hoping that love “be enough.” Love functions as a method for finding a way to live under and in spite of the depredations of patriarchy and vastly uneven power relations that seek to define the very materiality of life itself. This kind of love — just starting out, quotidian yet lyrical — is a methodology of tenderness and resilience that showcases Yoon’s impressive range when undertaking the intimate and the familiar.
While love is expansively elaborated as method throughout the collection, the frictions of introducing the animal sometimes eclipse the mechanics of the poems themselves. In “The Blades,” a gopher that crawls into a water pipe for a garden sprinkler is mercy killed with a shovel by the speaker’s friend, who is defined by their love for animals. Affectively, the poem is invested in the friend’s gentleness and kindness, their sensitivity to the currents of life in a world full of death: “As we sat, in that moment, two Koreans / in a white world, I wanted to marry you. / To protect the person who loves like no other.” Yet the poem analogizes the gopher’s mercy killing with the violence perpetrated against Asians: “Every day someone leans the shovel / and knife, real and not, against a gentler thing, / after striking another that looks like us.” The model minority myth is described as a technology of power and control, a kind of water pipe that can only bring death to those who seek to crawl out of it.
The drawn similarity between Asians and the gopher is meant to confer a multivalent charge to violence and gentleness, which do not exist in isolation but are defined by context. However, such an identification elides the particularity of the technologies of the model minority myth and the garden; namely, how the animal/human divide is an organizing distinction that subtends imperialism and taxonomies of racialization. The difference between human and animal dovetail with the model minority myth’s domestication of Asians as the “exemplar minority with advanced degrees and / gadgets, a superior meekness,” historically leveraged against other BIPOC groups that face greater dehumanization in our national imaginary.
To be clear, comparison is never a tidy equation with no remainders; it is the unhomogenizable excess that lends metaphor power and artfulness. Yet this poem’s remainders do not so much electrify the text as they occlude the dynamics of interpersonal tenderness it attempts to convey. The resulting imprecision opens the door to more hostile readings: If the shovel that cuts down the gopher is “kindness,” then what can this say about violence against Asians in this country? Such ambiguity is recuperated through return (the poem lingers not on the killing but the burying of the animal in “the same earth it came from”), a governing fantasy in the diasporic imagination that finds purchase in the register of the animal through the genre of the mercy killing. Furthermore, while the relationship between speaker and friend is squarely located in a “white world,” the distinction between the “human world” and the “natural world” remains out of focus, the mise-en-scene for the elaboration of a squarely human love. As I briefly glossed earlier, poems like “All my friends who loved trees are dead” mobilize the nonhuman as a challenging register of inflection and lived consideration, but “The Blades” renders violence against both Asian Americans and animals in half-light to better foreground the intimacies of friendship.
In this sense, Yoon’s complex portraiture of the intimacies of human relationality sometimes comes at the expense of the nonhuman as a potential inflection point for deepening what we call, remember, and find to be love. At its most troubled, Find Me as the Creature I Am unintentionally pits intimate (human) others against animal others, rather than attending to nonhuman modalities as a way to augment the collection’s elaboration of love-as-methodology. In the opening poem “What Carries Us,” Yoon invokes the horse (First, there was the horse”) to contrast the imaginary and material costs of transportation to see loved ones:
In cylinders of metal, we are four-legged
beast-lives of liminal spaces.
One time I was so tired of flying I wondered
if I would spend all my life packing then unpacking.
A complaint of privilege. We are such spending
creatures. And when I say we are beasts,
is that a metaphor?”
I can’t help but think of Ada Limón’s famous horse poem “What I Didn’t Know Before,” which shares many keywords with Yoon’s poem (creature, beast, liminal spaces, etc.) that are deployed in wildly different capacities. In Limón’s piece, horses giving birth to offspring that are “Not a baby by any means, not / a creature of liminal spaces, but already / a four-legged beast hellbent on walking” expresses an embodied creatureliness of spontaneous relationality. The implications of Limón’s pointed orchestration are two-fold: not only does it deliver the surprise of comparative association that gracefully expresses a unique, readily made human friendship that the speaker experiences (“what was between / us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed / over. It came out fully formed, ready to run”), but it also opens up the creaturely as a domain of relationality. By first presenting a “bare” fact about horses and then swinging into the particularities of friendship, Limón puts human/animal difference in generative proximity.
In Yoon’s poem, the horse is an image presented by the thought-power of metaphor to describe the discomforts of privileged travel. Citing Nikos Papastergiadis’s description of metaphor as “articulating action” and “transportation,” Yoon animates the horse metaphor (“Imagine love as a horse”) as interpersonal connection amongst technologies of disconnection: “In this era of brevity in this era of metal in this / era of abbreviation, yes, I’m trying to make you / think of me longer.” The speaker admits that “the bird, the train, the whole thing/ about metaphor” is a way to parse the speaker’s desire to remain connected with a distant other. The poem is not so much about creatures as it is about metaphor’s discursive power.
Reading this poem, particularly the line about us as “spending creatures,” I asked myself: What does it mean for a consumer to be a creature? For a creature to be a consumer? The gaps and initial incoherencies of consumer-as-creature and creature-as-consumer could be such rich grounds for reconfiguring the anthropocentric vectors of capitalistic waste and alienation that the poem is drowning in. It is disappointing that the creaturely is merely epiphenomenal to the speaker’s desire to travel to see their friend without feeling so uncomfortable and guilty about flying.
The collection’s attempt to reckon with privilege also appears in “Gala,” a poem about friends from the Global South and East attending a gala in Vermont, going to Paris, and otherwise moving in spaces of gilded empire. The resolution is a familiar one: “If the only world is a hell with my siblings, / I thought, I should feel lucky to call this world home.” The “hell” of empire’s luxuries afforded to these writers is traversed by returning to the affective capacities of friendship. While the vast majority of poets have no money to travel or attend galas, with only withered recourses in often extractive lotteries of contests and awards and fellowships, the poem’s recuperative return to interpersonal intimacies feels divorced from the very material conditions that contour and pressure them.
Furthermore, the book feels particularly weak in its middle section, comprised of a longer prose piece called “I leave Asia and become Asian.” Yoon is at her most frank and straightforward, weaving diasporic struggles with gun violence, personal memories, COVID-19, and a plethora of other experiences that constitute her positionality. In this essayistic mode, Yoon hits on the hallmarks of diasporic experience: absorbing a new language, the stinky lunchbox story, the impositions and atrocities visited upon Asian women. The piece is at its best when interlacing her own experiences in the imperial core with nuanced observations of Korea, such as Korean baths as a non-sexualizing place of encounter between women in contrast with the hypersexualization of Asian women in Canada and America. Such observations are brought into powerful relief through Yoon’s reflections on the Atlanta spa shootings.
However, Yoon sometimes veers into an explanatory mode, covering the model minority myth and sentiments such as “’Asian’ and ‘Asian American’ feel at once too big and too limiting.” While not quite remedial explanation — they are positioned within powerful memories and observations — such lines feel like redundant restagings of overfamiliar impasses and aporias of Asian/Asian American subjectivity that already vividly appear elsewhere in the collection. Yoon’s critical and creative energies that usually bring such congealed concepts into dynamic and moving lines are abruptly stoppered by explanations of fundamental Asian American concepts. “I leave Asia and become Asian” is an unevenly textured piece that, while providing formal variety for the collection as a whole, feels disconnected from the book’s core language despite the apparent throughline of friendship at the end (“We’re working on our lives”).
By “core language,” I mean the thematics of intimate connection that render love as a method for making a life in precarious worlds. But I would also argue, as is evident by my insistent looking at the collection’s usage of the word “creature,” that this book is at its best when it begins formulating a creaturely poetics, one that does not simply insist that “we are animal, too,” as the book’s jacket claims (I am not criticizing the poet for their publisher’s marketing material). More than simple identification or in service to the continuity and intelligibility of the human, a creaturely poetics brings into proximity the differences within and across the human/animal divide; such differences are not abrogated or resolved but obtrude into another plane of surprising encounter that relieves the pressures of mastery or knowledge to arrive at new modalities for imagining and feeling.
In “We do not have to touch everything we love,” Yoon weaves quotidian and ecological complaints of loneliness and vulnerability with the creaturely. The poem begins with our (human) loneliness in a burning world, the only reprieve mere distraction and preoccupation. Then, the animal suddenly emerges: “The seal and the turtle are trying to sleep.” The sense of loneliness is reconfigured away from “[m]y friends” and towards a menagerie of creatures also struggling, first opaquely (why are they trying to sleep?) and then connected to our habits (“We do not have to touch everything we love. / We hate those who outlive us”) and conditions (“Raccoons crawl frothing at their mouths / out of attics in this heat wave. / Eaglets jump off their nests in this heat wave. / Bless the AC in this heat wave, we yell”).
This is no didactic poem simply portending or explaining ecological disaster. Instead, a burning, lonely planet is revealed to be one replete with life—life in crisis, life in all its depletions, life unruly (“Bless the rats. Bless them and the raccoons / for not knowing the proper etiquette with property”). Cinching the poem, the last two lines index crisis through (the lack of) creaturely encounter:
Please. Someone. I am starving.
I haven’t seen a dragonfly in years.
The poem’s discursive ecosystem — and the affects and creatures inhabiting it — expand as the poem progresses, as the speaker finds themselves in relation with pests, attic dwellers, and sleepless animals beneath the waves. Uninterested in the ventriloquism of animal interiority or locating beasts as surfaces for inscribing human struggles, “We do not have to touch everything we love” recalibrates love away from anthropocentric seizure (“No, there is no ‘eco-friendly’ way to swim with dolphins”) and towards proximities of uncertain and ambivalent encounter, even when such encounters have receded out of direct interaction and manifest as a lethally warming planet.
What is at stake in this poem is not the continuity of human relation but the cultivation of a model of relationality that can accommodate Others that move beyond the domain of our touch—and is this not the basis of solidarity? A creaturely poetics within an Asian American poetic tradition could do the very work that Yoon asks in her essay:
Community requires building. If we claim membership to such a broad category, the “Asian American community,” imagine it as fellowship, friendship, family, we must ask—what work does it entail?
Asian American as an identity was founded as a political call for solidarity, for people from wildly different material and historical contexts to come together for better futures. Far from an inert description and identification of sameness, Yoon zeros in on the active work required to build what can be called Asian American community. The collection’s success is that it answers its own question. We do not have to rely upon throughlines of sameness to make legible our connections. Our struggles are shared with intimate others, unknown others, others that have yet to arrive and have long been forgotten. An Asian American identity that only ever seeks its own stable coherence in familiar grounding is at odds with its own constitutive movement. We do not have to touch everything we love.