Detonations
If pain makes the body turn to cold flame / If scars are the
photonegatives of suitable decisions / I wrote letter after letter to
the bomb maker /
I attended the bomb makers’ annual ball / Shawls of white grass and
waste and fury / The earth spits its teeth at us / Giant mechanical
hummingbirds fight over all the sugar /
The Koreans scab the Japanese in the sweet cane fields / Modernity
is a rust factory / The hard soft binary / Exoskeletons make war even
harder make our bodies insects and we are home / Lay down your
lances /
All you horses sleep next to your wildness you are the shadow / Ghosts
cocktails moonlight foxfire to read by / everywhere not libraries of
the body /
War the night show the day show the violins / the rubble the child
burials the blood / Hearts the red stop signs / the graves in the air /
your black or blackened hair
____________________________
Excerpted from The Wet Hex by Sun Yung Shin. Used with permission of the publisher, Coffee House Press. Copyright 2022 by Sun Yung Shin.
Sun Yung Shin
Sun Yung Shin is the author of thirteen books, including forthcoming essays collection Heart Eater: A Memoir of Immigration, Belonging, and How We Find Ourselves in Language (July 28, 2026). She is the author of five books of poetry, including Six Tones of Water (2024) co-authored with Vi Khi Nao; she is the editor of three anthologies of essays including What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories on Food and Family (2022). Also a children's book author, her latest picture book is Revolutions Are Made of Love: The Story of James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs (2025). Her books have won an Asian American Literary Award, a Minnesota Book Award, a Carter G. Woodson Award, and other honors. She has been awarded a fellowship from the MacDowell Foundation, two McKnight Artist & Culture Bearer Fellowships, and others. Born in Seoul, Korea, she lives on Dakota land in south Minneapolis, where she co-founded Poetry Asylum with poet Su Hwang. She teaches in many places, including with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
