The Wet Hex

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.

Publication date: June 14, 2022

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 120 pages

ISBN: 9781566896382

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

Winner of the 2023 Midland Authors Award for Poetry

Finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry

“Revelatory. . . . Formally inventive. . . . These poems also project us into the future, using the past as a resource to create materials for survival.”

—Elizabeth Hoover, The Star Tribune

“Enthralling and fantastical. . . . [Shin] begs us to consider what equality looks like for all living things. Shin’s writing is tight and seamless.”

—Katya Buresh, BOMB Magazine

“There are many marvels to unpack in The Wet Hex. . . . Shin’s lines glimmer and pop as they scrutinize the passage of time and the importance of legacy.”

—Diego Báez, Poetry Foundation

“At the apex of necropolitical (eco)catastrophe, myth, (ancestrally) collaborative, & cross-genre poetics, The Wet Hex is a project only the magic of a collective-minded poetics can hold.”

—George Abraham, TriQuarterly

“Brilliant, personal, candid, emotionally resonant, fantastic and sensational, mythical and mystical and musical, technically-sharp, lyrical, and attentive to the details in languages.”

—Michael Kleber-Diggs, Poetry Daily

“The Wet Hex, born out of the frugal feline year of Korean myths, modernizes and bewitches us with her transfixed vertical, etymological discourse on everything beguiling.”

—Vi Khi Nao

“Shin is a writer of profound skill and authentic presence. The Wet Hex is canorous, masterful, and utterly unique. It builds on her stellar body of work to advance what's possible in poetry and art.”

—Michael Kleber-Diggs

“Here spells are cast. The hex drips wet. The castaways come home.”

—Gabrielle Civil

“This is the most powerful book of poems I’ve read in years.”

—Lee Herrick