Explore our new BookBrowse Community Forum!

Book Summary and Reviews of Find Me as the Creature I Am by Emily Jungmin Yoon

Find Me as the Creature I Am by Emily Jungmin Yoon

Find Me as the Creature I Am

Poems

by Emily Jungmin Yoon

  • Published:
  • Oct 2024, 80 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About this book

Book Summary

From one of the sharpest up-and-coming voices in contemporary poetry, a stunning collection that explores our most fundamental instincts, capacity for affection, and the ways in which we resemble the wild.

Find Me as the Creature I Am is a book full of tenderness and violence, longing and love. Ranging from inherited family tales to meditations on the body to animals' display of love and grief alike, Emily Jungmin Yoon holds up a mirror to humanity to show that we are animal, too. In poems full of wonder and want, she showcases our tendencies to fight or fly, act with affection and cruelty, and ultimately, overflow with life itself.

"And when I say we are beasts, / is that a metaphor?" Yoon asks, exploring how we—like language, like any creature—stem from our surroundings. Braiding together reflections about the natural world, family heritage, and adoration, Yoon shows that what passes between us—body to body, generation to generation—is what defines a life. Deeply felt and beautifully crafted, Find Me as the Creature I Am is a rapturous collection by a rising star in the poetry landscape.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"I can always depend on Yoon's poems to achieve tenderness through an unbridled desire to flay history clean from its bones. Not only do these poems edify with knowledge, they're also revelations of feeling, wonder, and resolve, traveling through routes circuitous and vexed as the finest essays. But most remarkable of all, they position love as a method, a mode of seeing and being, perhaps even a future. Bravo." —Ocean Vuong, author of Time Is a Mother

"In her remarkable new collection, Find Me as the Creature I Am, Emily Jungmin Yoon performs a linguistic sleight of hand to heighten our experience of what it means to be alive. 'If we say only civilization can finish the world, does it mean to complete or destroy?' Relying on the tensions between ambiguity and clarity, Yoon shows us that love and death can speak simultaneously. Readers are going to be captivated and captured by the magic of her poetry." —Kimiko Hahn, author of The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems

This information about Find Me as the Creature I Am was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Emily Jungmin Yoon

Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes and A Cruelty Special to Our Species, a finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Yoon is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Ploughshares, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and The Sewanee Review. Yoon is the poetry editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and she is an assistant professor of Korean literature at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She splits her time between Honolulu and South Korea.

More Author Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more poetry & novels in verse...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Our Evenings
    Our Evenings
    by Alan Hollinghurst
    Alan Hollinghurst's novel Our Evenings is the fictional autobiography of Dave Win, a British ...
  • Book Jacket: Graveyard Shift
    Graveyard Shift
    by M. L. Rio
    Following the success of her debut novel, If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio's latest book is the quasi-...
  • Book Jacket: The Sisters K
    The Sisters K
    by Maureen Sun
    The Kim sisters—Minah, Sarah, and Esther—have just learned their father is dying of ...
  • Book Jacket: Linguaphile
    Linguaphile
    by Julie Sedivy
    From an infant's first attempts to connect with the world around them to the final words shared with...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

The only completely consistent people are the dead

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

F the M

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.