From From : : Poems

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A collection of poems reflects the experiences of Asian Americans and the problem of creating an Asian American identity while influenced by Westerners' ideas about Asians.

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Fantastic collection submitted by redwood on July 10, 2023, 7:10pm Youn’s artistry and intellectual rigor is on full display. Taking its title from the ubiquitous “Where are you *from* from?” question directed at Asian Americans, the collection probes Asian American identity, cultural and national constructions of meaning, anti-Asian violence, and the potentiality of poetics.

Youn’s constellation of images in this collection is surprising and imaginative. I especially admire her attitude towards some of the common tropes of Asian American literature (food, very unimaginative bullying) without suggesting that we have somehow moved beyond them. Persona poems reimagine figures from Greek mythology alongside Korean legends. Dr. Seuss and Eric Carle become important interlocutors for thinking about desire and Orientalism. And Youn approaches heavy events, like the murder of Latasha Harlins and the Atlanta spa murders, thoughtfully and without simply paying lip service.

The centerpiece of the collection is “In the Passive Voice,” a 45-page lyric essay that travels from the beach to the art museum, from immigration policy to parenting. These ranging influences add up to a searing treatise on desire and anti-Asian violence, which probes the assumptions and limits of language, makes arguments without foreclosing questions—that is, what poetry is best equipped to do.

“The very hungry caterpillar is an exemplar of desire. An object lesson. If desire is a hole in the self, the caterpillar eats and eats trying to fill that hole.

As if you could fill that hole.

But eventually it turns itself into that hole.

As if you could feed yourself to yourself.

Or maybe it’s an exemplar of motherhood, as in that horrific book The Giving Tree, in which the tree feeds itself to the child, first for nourishment, then for profit. The neoliberal nurturer.”