Monica Youn

Mar 20, 2023 | poetryfoundation.org | Monica Youn

The title of Monica Youn’s newest collection, From From (Graywolf Press, 2023), immediately calls to mind Gertrude Stein’s famous “there there.” Both phrases employ an emphatic excess, a doubling, a repetition to articulate an uncertain, unsettling absence. “There is no there there,” Stein writes in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) upon visiting Oakland and discovering her childhood home no longer stands.

Mar 9, 2023 | lithub.com | Monica Youn

One figure is female, the other is male. Both are contained. One figure is mythical, the other historical. They occupy different millennia, different continents. But both figures are considered Asian—one from Colchis, one from Korea. To mention the Asianness of the figures creates a “racial marker” in the poem. This means that the poem can no longer pass as a White poem, that different people can be expected to read the poem, that they can be expected to read the poem in different ways.

Mar 7, 2023 | nytimes.com | Joyelle McSweeney |Monica Youn |Graywolf Press

Book Review|A Poetic Dissection of America’s Racial, Racist Derangementhttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/books/review/monica-youn-from-from-poems.htmlPoetryIn her fourth book of verse, “From From,” Monica Youn turns a knowing eye on society’s love-hate relationship with what it sees as the “other.”Send any friend a storyAs a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

Mar 5, 2023 | greenapplebooks.com | Monica Youn |Solmaz Sharif

Join us on Friday, March 31 at 7pm PT when Monica Youn celebrates her latest collection, From From, with Solmaz Sharif at 9th Ave!Masks Encouraged for In-Person AttendanceOr watch online/Livestream available soonAbout From FromA major achievement by Monica Youn, “one of the most consistently innovative poets working today” (NPR). “Where are you from . . . ?

Feb 16, 2023 | publishersweekly.com | LaTasha N. Diggs |Monica Youn |Maggie Millner |Mahogany L. Browne

Edited by Nomi Stone and Luke Hankins. Orison, $18 trade paper (154p) ISBN 978-1-949039-39-9Ansel Elkin’s powerful poem, “Autobiography of Eve,” opens this anthology and inspires its title, championing a triumphant heroine “wearing nothing but snakeskin boots,” who proclaims, “Let it be known: I did not fall from grace. I leapt/ to freedom.” In poems that present the Fall from Eve’s point of view, disobedience is recast as rebellion or escape.