Monica Youn

* A Publishers Weekly Fall 2016 Top 10 Poetry Selection * *One of Brooklyn Magazine’s 100 Books to Read in 2016 * “Blackacre” is a centuries-old legal fiction—a placeholder name for a hypothetical estate. Treacherously lush or alluringly bleak, these poems reframe their subjects as landscape, as legacy—a bereavement, an intimacy, a racial identity, a pubescence, a culpability, a diagnosis. With a surveyor’s keenest tools, Youn marks the boundaries of the given, what we have been allotted: acreage that has been ruthlessly fenced, previously tenanted, ploughed and harvested, enriched and depleted. In the title sequence, the poet gleans a second crop from the field of Milton’s great sonnet on his blindness: a lyric meditation on her barrenness, on her own desire—her own struggle—to conceive a child. What happens when the transformative imagination comes up against the limits of unalterable fact?

Poems

Blackacre

From From

A collection of love poems based on George Herriman's comic strip characters Ignatz Mouse and Krazy Kat.

Ignatz

“Barter exchanges history for myth, direct speech for epistles, activity for observation . . . breathtaking.” —Claudia Rankine Felix the Rat’s hind feet could be Barbie hands— same pink, same injection-molded seaming. —from “Electronica” The poems in Barter , Monica Youn’s exciting first collection, negotiate transactions between scarcity and excess, pornography and abstraction, the thing and the thing seen. Rendered with a dazzling array of structures and allusions, these poems describe—and become—a strange gallery of paintings and portraits. She offers a Polaroid left on a windshield, step-by-step instructions for “Drawing for Absolute Beginners,” a stereoscope with a box of slides. Both an homage to and a warning against nonexistent things, Barter introduces a vibrant new voice and a new way of seeing.

Monica Youn

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