Some Are Always Hungry

by Jihyun Yun

Overview

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Some Are Always Hungry chronicles a family’s wartime survival, immigration, and heirloom trauma through the lens of food, or the lack thereof. Through the vehicle of recipe, butchery, and dinner table poems, the collection negotiates the myriad ways diasporic communities comfort and name themselves in other nations, as well as the ways cuisine is inextricably linked to occupation, transmission, and survival. Dwelling on the personal as much as the historical, Some Are Always Hungry traces the lineage of the speaker’s place in history and diaspora through mythmaking and cooking, which is to say, conjuring.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496223623
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Series:	The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	66
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Jihyun Yun is a Korean American poet from California who now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A Fulbright research grant recipient, she has received degrees from the University of California–Davis and New York University. Her work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Adroit Journal, and other publications.

Table of Contents

All Female    
My Grandmother Thinks of Love while Steeping Tea    
Passage, 1951    
Bone Soup, 1951    
For Now, Nothing Burns    
Diptych of Girl in 1953    
Field Notes from My Grandparents    
Immigration    
Homonyms    
I Revisit Myself in 1996    
War Soup    
The Daughter Transmorphic    
Yellow Fever    
Saga of the Nymph and the Woodcutter    
Fish Head Soup    
Recipe: 닭도리탕    
Diptych of Animal and Womb    
Aubade    
Mother Undresses    
Blood Type    
Lilith        
Husband Stitch    
The Tale of Janghwa and Hongryeon    
Caught        
Menstruation Triptych    
Some Are Always Hungry    
Immigration    
Benediction as Disdained Cuisine    
Praise        
Thirst        
Homecoming    
Savaging    
Revisitations    
The Leaving Season    
Reversal    
Grandmother, Praying    

Acknowledgments    

Editorial Reviews

08/17/2020

In this excellent debut, Yun lingers over descriptions in precise and evocative language. In one poem, a kiss tastes like bellflowers; in another “your lip, a crushed berry,/ spills its wet cerise.” But rather than rest as ornamented observation, Yun’s language spins together themes of food, the legacy of Japan’s occupation of Korea, and the ubiquity of misogynistic violence. While the collection mostly consists of short lyrics, these are carefully sequenced to draw out complexities and juxtapositions, such as when a poem in which the speaker is naked with a lover is followed by a poem about a mother’s skin marked by illness. It’s in longer poems, such as one constructed from a recipe for dakdoritang, and “Leaving Season” (set on a beach, in shifting stanzas), where Yun demonstrates the true extent of her powers, building memorable worlds. When she writes, “the moon looks too whole. I want/ to pull it through a sieve,” readers are likely to believe that she could. This is a lush and moving collection. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

“In this visceral yet compassionate inquiry into what makes us alive, Yun shows us how hope can be fashioned out of the desire to speak on and through atrocities. This book is one of those rare collections that stuns me back to my own life, somehow renewed, somehow better, kinder, and less alone.”—Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds
 

Ocean Vuong

“Jihyun Yun’s captivating poems hold a wise and magnetic energy at the center of each page, one rarely seen in a first book. This is a poet of grace and elemental blood-wisdom who will pull you to unexpected terrains where food is a vehicle not just to explore lineage and ancestors but to navigate the winding roads of the present and the future. . . . Some Are Always Hungry is a most magnificent and memorable debut from a deeply talented poet I’m certain we’ll be turning to again and again.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Oceanic
 

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

“Image by clear-eyed image, sound by tightly wrought sound, the poems in Some Are Always Hungry are a thundering revelation. At once a reckoning with immigration and historical trauma and rooted in the sensorial world, these poems are timeless and ongoing. Here is both the fever and the scar it leaves, the female body and the lineage of power, hunger, and desire, what cannot be forgotten and what keeps us alive despite it all; here is a poet staking her undeniable claim on the world.”—Ada Limón, author of The Carrying
 

Ada Limón