Unbearable Splendor

Who is guest, and who is host? Adoption, Antigone, zombies, clones, and minotaurs—all building blocks, forming and reforming our ideas.

Poetry as essay, as a way of hovering over the uncanny, sci-fi orientalism, Antigone, cyborgs, Borges, disobedience.

Sun Yung Shin moves ideas around like building blocks, forming and reforming new constructions of what it means to be guest, to be host. How to be at home.

Publication date: October 11, 2016

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5 x 7.75

Page count: 136 pages

ISBN: 9781566894517

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Sun Yung Shin is the author of poetry collections Rough, and Savage and Skirt Full of Black, which won an Asian American Literary Award. She coedited the anthology Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and is the author of Cooper’s Lesson, a bilingual Korean/English illustrated book for children. She’s received grants and fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and elsewhere. She lives in Minneapolis.

Winner of the 2017 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry

Finalist for the 2017 PEN America Poetry Award

“The splendor on display in Shin’s book consists of an incredibly compact use of commanding and vibrant language which coheres into work that feels restless and deft, as cerebral as it is emotional.”

—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Like a lean, mean, efficient literary machine, Sun Yung Shin’s Unbearable Splendor uses its hybrid nature to arrive on bookshelves as something very true, heartbreaking, and, ultimately, unbearably human.”

—Chicago Review of Books

“A heady, multidimensional and multi-textured read.” 

—The Corresponder

“We have not heard or seen or read anything like this before, a truly unique, essential, and original collection.” 

—NewPages

“[Unbearable Splendor] is a project of reclamation of one’s own humanity.” 

—Jacket2

“While unabashedly scholarly, Unbearable Splendor is heartbreaking.” 

—The Star Tribune

“Shin’s poetry is as cerebral as it is beautiful, exploring the personal experiences of race, immigration, and gender alongside academic investigations of religion and science, philosophy and art.” 

—Bustle

“In Sun Yung Shin’s gifted hands, cyborgs become the mechanism by which to examine the self, humanity, and the individual’s place in an automated world.”

—Signature

“At once sensual, philosophical, mind-bending in its juxtapositions, . . . Unbearable Splendor is a liminal book, but one that invites the reader to cross all its boundaries.”

—The International Examiner

“I was profoundly moved by the questions and deep bits of feeling in this gorgeous, sensing work, and am honored to write in support of its extraordinary and brilliant writer, Sun Yung Shin.”

—Bhanu Kapil

“To read Shin’s work is to marvel at a rosebud’s concealed and silent core and to slowly witness its elegant blooming. It is a delicate and majestic show.”

—Jenny Boully

“In our vast expanse, where ‘every species is transitional,’ Shin’s lyricism, erudition, and tonal command of loss and indignation harmonize into a singular nucleus that hums and pulsates through each of these wondrous poetic meditations.” 

—Ed Bok Lee