The Wet Hex

There are many marvels to unpack in The Wet Hex, Sun Yung Shin’s fourth book of poems. From an urgent interrogation of parentage and genealogical interruptions (“Orphan your ancestors in the underworld”), to indictments of our industrial age (“Modernity / is a rust factory”), and a cutting account of a speaker’s sense of distance from their own identity (“I realized I did not know the Korean word for daughter. 딸”), Shin’s lines glimmer and pop as they scrutinize the passage of time and the importance of legacy.

At the center of the collection is a reimagining of the Korean myth of the first mudang (a priestess or shaman), Princess Bari, who is abandoned by her father at birth yet decides to traverse the lands of the living and the dead to save him when she learns of his illness. Shin’s poetic retelling is paired with artwork by Jinny Yu, whose drawings of geometric shapes complement Shin’s lyrics, as when the image of an oblong box accompanies an account of the first moments after Bari is cast away:

A servant brought a jade box and carved “바리데기” on the
     cover.
Abandoned Child.

The newborn was placed inside the box and the box was carried to a stream and the stream decided to become thicker than jade and thus the jade box floated along with the current.

The stream made a rough, green ribbon, a long door.

Elsewhere, Shin draws on her penchant for poetic storytelling to revisit a foundational biblical text. In the process, the poet makes us see the continuities that exist across disparate cultures:

then Isaac’s feet turned                    cloven
next soft wool grew all over             his body
he didn’t notice                               הָעֲקֵדָה(the binding)
how animal skin is a herald of         abandonment and woe
how he was becoming                     a black box

Shin’s complex, expansive approach to themes of childhood, abandonment, and myth make for a fascinating, multifaceted collection.