Emily Jungmin Yoon’s new poetry collection Find Me as the Creature I Am (Knopf Publishing Group, 2024) spans geographies, cultures, and the multiple ways we are human. Each poem defies easy categorization. These are nature poems. They are political poems. They are daughter poems. They are grief poems. They are pledges to the messy possibilities of being alive. Yoon navigates the identities foisted on her by a fraught culture that has historically othered “Asian Americans,” a term that she acknowledges as “too small and too big” to capture her sense of self. Despite all the reasons to rage, Yoon reveals, with tenderness and precision, a predilection for delight and vulnerability as she invites the reader to discover her, as the title suggests, for the creature that she is.
Emily Jungmin Yoon, an assistant professor of Korean literature at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes,the 2017 winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize by Tupelo Press, and A Cruelty Special to Our Species. She currently splits her time between Honolulu and South Korea.
I spoke to Yoon via Zoom about the geographies and cultural forces that shape her poetry, how she imagines the future for the ones she loves, and why beauty is so necessary to being human.
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The Rumpus: This collection occupies many geographies. How do these diverse geographies and cultures inform your place in the world?
Emily Jungmin Yoon: A lot of these poems were written in Chicago and in South Korea, where my family is. Some of the poems were written in Hawai’i, where I live currently. Once I moved here, I felt an impulse to rethink the way I describe things. I think a lot about a place of un-belonging that I [occupy] here as a settler, as someone who didn’t grow up in Hawai’i, someone who doesn’t know the historical context. I am learning. I might look at a beautiful bird I love and find out that they are an invasive species, or the trees that I love might be invasive as well or brought here for the curation of tourists’ pleasure. So I felt this urgency to know more but also found that I am so inadequate. Trying to write from that unsettled knowledge has been a productive struggle for me. I don’t think I’m going to just turn to silence or give up on trying to describe my life here. Part of that struggle went into the poems in this book as well.
Rumpus: Many despairing themes come together in your collection: violence, grief, racism and natural disaster. And yet, your poems also insist on pleasure. What do you think the role of pleasure is in a broken world?
Yoon: A lot of these poems were written during the lockdown, in the early stages of the pandemic. I really meditated on the tenderness I feel toward friends and family and the love I feel for them. Some of them passed away during that time. I had a lot of time to dwell in that love for them. I needed to capture in my words, in a time when everything is breaking down, the world is burning up, how do I maintain the energy to continue going? A lot of the time, while I was in those meditations, writing seemed to not make sense. What is the point of writing all [these poems] when I can’t share them with people in the physical room, together? What is the point of poetry when people are dying? I tried to experiment with coming back to love, as mockish as that sounds, to energize me.
Rumpus: The poem “Elsewhere” evokes both an awareness of being and the accompanying terror that life is finite. It also offers a kind of solace, something different beyond the heaven and hell tropes.
Yoon: Kimiko Hahn, my thesis advisor for my MFA, once said something that really stuck with me: “When I die, I know I will be with my mother wherever she is. If she is ash, I will be ash with her.” I’m paraphrasing here, but no matter where I go, it’ll be where my mother is. I just found that to be so incredibly beautiful. It gave me a lot of solace when thinking about death, which has always been a difficult and scary topic for me. I returned to that quote a lot. That poem was born out of that.
I had a lot of dogs growing up. My family in South Korea still has dogs. It sounds flippant, after having quoted Kimiko about her mother, but after my dogs passed away, I sometimes think that they’re just in another country. In Hawai‘i, for instance, if I see a dog that looks like one of my dogs, I think it must be them, living a different life that I don’t have the same access to anymore. They’re elsewhere. I know it sounds very maudlin, but it does give me pleasure and joy to think about that in that way.
Rumpus: The speaker’s self-concept and identity shifts as she is othered by white culture in the poem “I Leave Asia and Become Asian American.” You write, “Asian and Asian American feel at once too big and too limiting.” How does an individual resist and claim her own identity, especially when there is a currency of violence? What is the responsibility of the collective to enable that kind of self-empowerment?
Yoon: I think about a lot as well, especially nowadays. How do we show up? How do we show solidarity for Palestinians? For example, Palestine is part of Asia, but I don’t feel like this has been very central to discussions surrounding Asian American identity. I think it’s arising now, but before October 7, I don’t think it took a lot of space in discussions about Asian American identity, Asian American community. We have to go back to the history of that term, “Asian American” and how it was a political term, born out of a very deliberate effort to have allegiance against mainstream white culture, especially against war, colonialism, and imperialism.
People who use [Asian American] as a term have to go back to its history. We learn what the history is so we can evaluate the ethics of our time. That applies to etymology, to the vocabulary that we use, as well.
One way we can move forward, thinking about it, is specificity. If we’re going to have a flippant listicle about the “Top 10 Asian Americans to Read Right Now,” and they’re all East Asian Americans, like me, is it okay to say these are East Asian Americans? I’m not advocating for wholesale discarding of that term. I want to be more specific, and if I use that word, I think I just want to add that on. Another way of adding specificity, but in a different way, is by augmenting the information.
Rumpus: How has your craft evolved over time? How have you changed as a poet?
For my first book, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, I used documentary materials, real testimonies, to tell the stories of the “comfort women,” the euphemism for the sex slaves of the Japanese Empire during World War II. The book centers their history, but it also includes poems on my own contemporary geographical, cultural, personal, and linguistic context and experiences as a bilingual, ethnically Korean immigrant woman, whose homes and families are split across the Pacific, and whose identity cannot be figured into the alien/native binary axis often used to understand or categorize Asian diasporic people. A Cruelty Special to Our Species,for me, is a living archive of memories, both personal and historical, that centers Korean women. I say living archive because I don’t want the subjects or events to become static objects, but I want our collective voices to come alive, and I want to render history as a continuous chain of actions that we are witnessing in this very moment.
With Find Me as the Creature I Am, I found myself largely meditating on love in the time of climate crisis and what we as humans do to the ultimate other, the natural world. I found myself imagining the future a lot in these newer poems—a future in which I may be gone but the climate crisis continues. I laboriously try for hope. Not hope as a means to turn away from reality but hope as a force to keep the love inside me alive; hope as a necessary method of survival. As I continued working on this manuscript, I decided to commit to an emotional experiment to affect the direction of the writing: to end every poem with love. I promised myself that when I find myself going dark in the poem, which is often for me, I will make every effort to turn it around, or find the light in it, with the determination that, no matter what, I will end this with love. Well, it doesn’t always work. The poem has a mind of its own. But it’s somewhat soothing and productive to still try.
I think as a poet overall, I’ve come to really picture specific people when I write, regardless of what the poem is about. They are people who have read and understand my poetry thoroughly. It’s helpful because imagining an abstract “audience” can feel daunting; if I can imagine these specific people liking the poem, I’m happy. I just realized what I’m saying feels very akin to the phrase “What would Jesus do?” but with the best readers of my work, instead of Jesus.
Rumpus: The collection includes a variety of poetic styles. Can you speak to how you assembled the poems?
I would like to borrow what poet Wo Chan said at a reading to a similar question. They said that they saw their poetry manuscript as a musical performance; what kind of note is needed here, where should a turn take place, etcetera. I had not thought of it that way, but it’s an apt metaphor and speaks to how I try to arrange poems too. I try to pace the poems so that the reader has some breathing room in between—in terms of poem lengths and heaviness of topics—and easily pick up the themes that thread the poems together. For Find Me as the Creature I Am, I also knew which poems should be the beginning and the end. These two poems are ones that portray two figures, both together and not, and bound by love; hopefully you’ll see what I mean when you read the poems.
Rumpus: The last poem in the collection is set in a post-apocalyptic future, where the speaker achieves selfhood. Do you think it will take the destruction of the planet to regenerate and become our best selves?
Yoon: I don’t know about my best self. I wrote this poem in a kind of hopeful, wishful imagination, [that] the person that I love, or the people that I love will survive in all the futures that I can imagine, and even if I am reborn as a bug or a leaf under a stone, that we will find each other. It’s not necessarily that I think we have to reincarnate to be our best self. It’s more that whatever happens to me, I just cannot, I refuse to imagine, my loved ones suffering or dead.
Rumpus: What do you hope readers get out of this collection?
Yoon: The first book I wrote used a kind of anger and sorrow as my engine force for writing. Even though it was a lot of anger and sorrow, it was also love. In this book, I tried to turn to care. What does it mean to care for myself in my poetry? I hope readers can see the emotional continuity between the two books.
I want people to feel that they are not alone in feeling these really hard emotions. There’s another quote that I return to often, something that Toni Morrison said about beauty, which is that beauty is not a privilege. It’s a type of knowledge, it’s a kind of quest, and it’s what we are born for. Poetry helps me try to create beauty out of even the ugliest situations, personally and globally. By beauty, I don’t mean something necessarily pleasant or perfectly symmetrical. It’s something that makes me more thoughtful about the language that I used to describe the people around me, the things around me in the world in which I live. Beauty can be a really useful method in how we treat ourselves and the world. I hope that the poems in the book carry that message. There’s a productive tension between grief and beauty, and what it means to be confronting both at the same time.
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Author photograph courtesy of Emily Jungmin Yoon
