My chosen Asian American Poet

Sun Yung Shin
• I chose this Poet because She comes from a completely different background, she was adopted and taken out of her Asian American family and life and was raised in Chicago by a Polish –Irish- German and Catholic family. I was interested to see what her poetry would sound like and what her main focus or theme would be.
• Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, South Korea and was raised in Chicago. She has lived in Boston, Pittsburgh, St. Paul, and Minneapolis and has worked at a variety of jobs including a clerk at a sheet music-and-band instrument store, drugstore delivery girl, a nanny, an often laid-off software development analyst, and a poet-in-residence. Shin's poetry, reviews, and essays have been widely published. She currently lives in Minneapolis with her husband and their two children. She recently published her first childrenÕs book, CooperÕs Lesson.
• Sun Yung Shin is the author of a book of poems Skirt Full of Black (Coffee House Press, 2007); co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (South End Press, 2006); and author of bilingual Korean/English book for children Cooper’s Lesson (Children’s Book Press, 2003). Her essays and fiction are anthologized in Transforming a Rape Culture (Milkweed), Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writings (Temple University), The Encyclopedia Project, Vol. 1, A-E, and The Praeger Handbook of Adoption (Greenwood Publishing). With Rachel Moritz she publishes and edits WinteRed Press; they have recently published work by Fanny Howe, Rodrigo Toscano, and Gabrielle Civil. She lives in Minneapolis.
• Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, South Korea and grew up in Chicago as the adopted child of a Polish-Irish-German Catholic American family. This experience as a transcultural adoptee was highly influential on her later work and the themes and issues she addresses. She was encouraged to write by one of her teachers in school, although she had been writing in school for a long time, this teacher encouraged her to write poetry.
• She likes to work with themes like: women's economic status, class shifts, and transnationalism. As she says in her interview with Asian American Press “Read into the past. Don't just look at what your contemporaries are doing. Read criticism. Read outside the U.S. Look at how language is used for what purposes and by whom, examine how our condition has been located in language. And fight the Man! As my teacher Mark Nowak says, poetry should be revolutionary”


One of her poems:
American Missionary, 1895, Korean Peninsula

I am a union of devices. My fruit farm, my zeal.

Carve me from labor.

I will smooth the brow of any convert. My thumb fears no flesh.

I am her husband, I am his wife. I am their large and luxurious children, flinging themselves through the blue on the see-saw. Her very bare feet, my woman, my wife. The white feet and inside her white bones.

At night her body makes a white cross against the sheets. Star liquor and the red scent of freckles—

Nothing creeps under our door to paint its headlights across the headboard. No natives. No verse. No Latin.

No traffic but the blank heat of my prayer, tracing the white cross, bone against bone.

My appeal, my plea, my application of restraint.