Presenting engagements (including reviews) of poetry books & projects. Some issues also offer Featured Poets, a "The Critic Writes Poems" series, and/or Feature Articles.

Friday, May 1, 2015

FEATURED POET: SUN YUNG SHIN

POEMS 
from the forthcoming UNBEARABLE SPLENDOR (Coffee House Press, 2016):









When I’m at home
people don’t ask me who I am
They know at once that it’s me
because I’m the only one who’s home
and so all kinds of things enter me

- from “Shadow Janitor,” by Kim Hyesoon,
translated by Don Mee Choi, The Ampersand Review



Old English gæst, giest (Anglian gest) "guest; enemy; stranger," the common notion being “stranger,"

Consider all doors.

Opening of an ampoule, space, wind > light.

Animal its sere, stiff robe, canters in place, species against every epoch, flower-skull and the last kick far between. Velocity capillaried like water ringing a tree..

Still-limber, hunt-cut, child-bundled. Dark star and diurnal wash all the same soaking in.

Or doored as the boards of the ship that sent you. The vessel that brought you, the arms that pulled you. Vessel, your queer coffin, your name following your overboard.

All the shipwrecks sailing within us. I must disembark at every coast inside me. The docks grow open as mouths.


from Proto-Germanic *gastiz (cognates: Old Frisian jest, Dutch gast, German Gast, Gothic gasts "guest," originally "stranger"),











from PIE root *ghos-ti- "stranger, guest; host" (cognates: Latin hostis "enemy," hospes “host"  


Hospital. Shelter for the needy.

Metal doors and bars. Tragic panthers inside for your own protection. Head down, animal. Acquaint the glossy side of your face with the cement floor. No competition here, no culling. You’re the last one. You’re the last sterile one.

Under bridges, cardboard castle, trash moat, hate moat. No meds no job no home. Something in your blood is bad. Your brain is in your blood. Drain, salvage, hide, blind.

8 billion pine boxes today! Long-stem roses in a box from Mexico for everyone. There’s not room for everyone. Who was here first. Private property the work of God. Discipline and disobedience. My blank body: dim root with a thousand eyes. Splitting into the dark. They finger their way down. Eat dirt, spit dirt, be dirt.

But your body doused with oil; the wrong side of the ground, a sister digging a grave in the air.

Your body all in flames—witch, bleach, blanch, stitch, torch, clutch.

Library of bodies borrowed. Returned. Scholars to the last.  

Strange deck of cards, pages in gorgeous disarray, the last book written.

Amnesty.


from *hosti-potis "host, guest," originally "lord of strangers" -- Greek xenos "guest, host, stranger;"










Old Church Slavonic gosti "guest, friend," gospodi "lord, master");


Waiting for white rope, become the unbraid. Raveled, ends burned closed, heavy as hair. One day we will all be sea.

Does my day stalk me or do I grow it within me. My first and final masterpiece. Breath, brush, breath, bath, last.  

My enemy, my house, my horse, my hound.

Border, brother, bastard. Every eye a sorrow meter, every ear a room of private silence. Clouds of it. Storms moving through.  

Feast, fast, guest, host.

Every room of this life; all of us guarding the wrong things.

One country of the living. This port.

Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat? Then crouch within the door-

the root sense, according to Watkins, probably is “someone with whom one has reciprocal duties of hospitality,"











representing “a mutual exchange relationship highly important to ancient Indo-European society."


Bend your good eyes toward the crashing ceiling of water. Ever-changing door. You can’t open it. You are already in it. It is home and tomb. Womb and veil. Wall and wail.

A guest here. My dowry everywhere.
Come to the races. Lucky number. A thousand trousseaus...

Flag, gown, and shroud.
Loomed and unloomed. A woman with time in her hands. Bedded, unwedded. Inventory possessions: father, son, missing husband, servants, loom, bed made from an olive tree, drunk suitors, money, land, some beauty...

Magnetic field of the earth, yield your bombs. Spit them out. Regrow the limbs. Identification papers back in the jacket. Tanks reversed, tracking backward. Children tucked back into their beds.


But as strangers are potential enemies as well as guests, the word has a forked path.












“Predictably, Asia functions in Blade Runner as the alluring and foreign “other” of the West, the normal, and the present: it is the extra kick that makes the near future look like “New York on a bad day” to quote the director – dirty, overcrowded, full of freaks, the poor, and people of color. Yet not so predictably, this “other” also is linked with the morally ambiguous hero (and yes, Deckard is a replicant).

What I wanted to show in the rest of the chapter through my analysis of oriental style in the film’s architecture, cityscape, and characters is how what some of us might be quick to identify as racist isn’t always intentional – that in fact, such unintentional, casual racism continues the imperialist legacy of seeing non-white people as “not quite human.””

Jane Chi Hyung Park, on her book Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema

“I want to see it work on a person. I want to see it work on a negative before I provide you with the positive.”

Dr. Eldon Tyrell, Blade Runner




IN THE OTHER FUTURE

1.      As a child there were many field trips to the Robert Crown Center for Health Education in Hinsdale, Illinois. I remember nothing except Valeda, the TAM (Transparent Anatomical Mannikin); she lived there on a platform on a stage in a dark room. She was made by a German medical artist. There were several of her around the country and in Europe. I only ever met her, not the others of her.

2.      She was a teacher. She lit up. She told me not to be afraid to be manufactured. To be immortal until I wasn’t. Like me she could talk without moving her mouth.

3.      To be assembled and disassembled.

4.      To dis-ease and dis-order.

5.      To be a modern child. To be worth your weight in gold.

6.      To be worth less and less as you grow older, to be an old, cheap child.

7.      Abject, object, select.

8.      There once were two anatomical manikins, twins. The one on the left did all the talking, the one on the right had no face. The one on the left was muscles and organs. The one on the right was bones.

9.      Everyone can see through me. Everyone can see all the people inside me. In my computer model, which can separate into layers, there are so many different people inside me, I myself haven’t even met them all yet. My twin to the left of me, or the right of me. One of me has a face, one of me can talk to the audience.

10.   Why can’t I see the whole world all at once if the whole world can see me?

11.   I’m living in the future. I have also left myself behind in the past. As if there’s a front and a back, as if time is like walking through the back door of a house and out through the front. As if there are rooms and floors inside. As if time was a flood and was filling all the rooms and closets, breaking the windows and making everything touch everything else all at once.

12.   The positive me is testing the negative me, always asking me questions and trying to trick me into believing it is human, or that I am human, or that we are both machines. All of these machines inside us, lungs, heart, gut, brain, eyes, everything moving of their own volition. A flock of birds, a pack of wolves. I am like one hundred electrical eels. Our skin is an extravagant tongue, tasting everything, making the dark things inside us jealous. Those stealthy sea creatures, always plotting and scheming, rarely giving me the news.

13.   In the future, no one is completely human. Some people never tire of upgrading. I wanted wings until all the countries moved into the air.

14.   I let Deckard rape me so, you know, it wasn’t rape. I remember playing the piano at home. I remember having my picture taken. Being a replicant means you never have to be a powerless child. You never have to be old. Time moves around you but you never change. You have less than the lifespan of a pet dog but look how well people treat their dogs.

15.   If I were a dog I would mate with a wolf. Devolve. I think humans remember being wild, too. I could still eat all this light and turn into a white room.

16.   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.

17.   Empty orchestra. You can see through me, you can trust me, I have nothing to hide, I’m right here, I’m not going any where.











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Benefits of decoupled reproduction
Conception became a third party interruption
Lineal transplant

Copies in wonderland
If I press into you hard enough I can make a carbon copy
One man could have millions of children with millions of women

Not everyone is invited to the party of multiplication
Games to be blindfolded, pin the tail on the half-sibling
My womb a piñata, paper donkey, mule

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Take a bat to the candy from the sky
Pick it all up before it’s gone, greedy fingers
Re = again, plicare = to fold

Obsolescence of the family every science fiction fantasy
In the pursuit of happiness
Every species is transitional

What are you bringing to the party?
I see my father every time I look in the mirror but I wouldn’t recognize him on the street
Perhaps in a lineup, if I could put my hands next to his, or look at his teeth, like a horse

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Honey, can you pick up some eggs on the way home?
Her children are 40, 30, 20, 10, 5, 1
After she dies, her eggs can still be used. A body so quiet

All animals need, directly or indirectly, other animals to die so they can live
Family tree like a virus. Contagion, pandemic, and R of ______________.
Surplus embryos. A dozen twins terminated in vitro. They went back to Galapagos

Each beak would have been slightly different. We want to look into their eyes
But I was asking to be born, every cell alive, every mitosis eating space
I’ve seen what happens when women take up space

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Each termination a love letter to space. Abraham and Isaac but without the intervention
The un-transplant
Offshore the body

Outsource the future
Their hundred children apex predators
A moveable feast, each their own calendar and code

Stronger, better, faster. More human than human. Homo replicatus
Each child with a dog inside and a wolf outside
They are winners, survivors. Culture, frozen, implanted, gestated, born, they passed all the tests

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Why shouldn’t they grin
Show us their teeth






*****


Sun Yung Shin 신 선 영 is the author of the forthcoming book Unbearable Splendor from Coffee House Press as well as poetry collections Rough, and Savage and Skirt Full of Black, also from CHP. She has new fiction and essays in recent anthologies The Encyclopedia Project, Penumbrae, and Others Will Enter the Gates. She is editing a new anthology A Peculiar Price: New Writing on Race in Minnesota, which will be available in early 2016 from the Minnesota Historical Society Press. She also 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 lives in Minneapolis.



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