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The Wet Hex - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Wet Hex

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Sun Yung Shin calls her readers into the unknown now-future of the human species, an underworld museum of births, deaths, evolutions, and extinctions.

Personal and environmental violations form the backdrop against which Sun Yung Shin examines questions of grievability, violence, and responsibility in The Wet Hex. Incorporating sources such as her own archival immigration documents, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Christopher Columbus’s journals, and traditional Korean burial rituals, Shin explores the ways that lives are weighed and bartered. Smashing the hierarchies of god and humanity, heaven and hell, in favor of indigenous Korean shamanism and animism, The Wet Hex layers an apocalyptic revision of nineteenth-century imagery of the sublime over the present, conjuring a reality at once beautiful and terrible.

ISBN-13: 9781566896382

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Coffee House Press

Publication Date: 06-14-2022

Pages: 128

Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

Sun Yung Shin is a Korean-born poet, writer, collaborative artist, and bodyworker. She/they lives in Minneapolis.

Table of Contents

Translate This Body into Everything 1

Section 1 There Is / Never / Enough

A Spade Is for Piercing the Ground and a Shovel Is for Heaving 5

Mines and Museums, or, the DMZ Is a Nature Preserve 7

Behind This Door Is a Siberian Tiger 8

An Orphan Receives Her Commercial UNA Test Results from Two Companies: An Abecedarian 9

Castaways in Paradise 10

History of Domestication 12

How an Animal Knows Where She Ends and You Begin 13

An Orphan Considers the Hand of God 14

Section 2 Violence Is Not a Metaphor

Botany of Death 19

Detonations 20

Bayonets and Bonfire 21

Specimens of Immortality 22

I Wandered into a Mass Extinction Event 23

He Said That We Should Turn Back 24

Section 3 The Underworld Holds All Tethers

Gaze _ Observatory _ Threshold: A $$$ Baridegi Reimagining 29

Section 4 Fate Is a Debt

The Wolvish Forage 59

Unnatural Selection 64

A Black Box Theory of Descent 65

The Binding 67

Wheels of Misfortune 68

In the House of Moths 69

Our Country Laundered Us 70

Section 5 A White Forked Flame

Sublime: Sailing Through a Midnight Sea 73

Whiteness: A Spell Thrown 77

Fish Scales All Over This Ark 79

Ravishing Migrations 80

Transit from Lintel to Lintel 81

My First Voyage Out 82

Tiger \ Fade In, Fade Out 85

Evolution in the Underworld 88

Lullaby \ Goodnight 90

Appendix: L'Etranger \ An Unburial | A Funeral 93

Sources 97

Acknowledgments 99