By Sarah Sukardi
How does one live in the aftermath of abandonment? What tools does one have available to perform this act of lifelong endurance? In Sun Yung Shin’s fourth poetry collection, The Wet Hex, her tools are translation, mythology, literature, poetry itself: all methods by which a poet might find herself in a lineage of other writers. Shin is a transracial adoptee from Korea, and lineage is one of her lifelong concerns. It is thus fitting that Shin’s collection is “dedicated to those cast away”— other adoptees, but also those estranged from their cultures and countries: other migrants, other Koreans, other women. This is a collection which grapples with the aftermath of being cast away.
Shin’s poetry is haunted by various forms of accounting: the list, the dictionary, the appendix. It is divided into five sections of roughly equal length, and flanked by an introductory poem and an appendix. In the first poem of the collection, “Translate This Body into Everything,” Shin writes of “Korean girls who slept with the dictionary / so they would never be alone, so one day / they could give birth to bruises and poetry.” This is perhaps a way to speak of Shin’s poetry itself: language provides solace and comfort, and the dictionary allows for the understanding of language, the creation of poetry. But every mode for healing also has a twin capacity for trauma and “bruises,” and the collection is both a means of understanding one’s abandonment and reenacting it.
In Shin’s “Sublime: Sailing through a Midnight Sea,” the 19th-century précis serves as another form of list-like accounting. The title of the poem is immediately succeeded by: “[utopias of descent, meditations on the sublime, the whale, the whiteness of insomnia, Wera Knoop, the insane husband and the selfsame drowned husband, the missing, the obsolete—].” This précis is a brief survey of Western mysticism: Sir Thomas More, Moby-Dick, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the poem itself is divided into sections, each purporting to elaborate more on the word “sublime” through western concepts with subheadings such as ETYMOLOGY, CHEMISTRY. The rigorous subheads, however, soon transform into those of more associative concepts: an ANAGRAM of sublime (“blueism”) transforms into a definition of BLUEISM (“the possession or affectation of learning in a woman,” which transforms into “BLUESTOCKING,” or “noun (derogatory) an intellectual or literary woman.” Rigorous ways of defining and understanding words give way to literal wordplay. “elimbus,” or sublime near-reversed, transforms into “eliminate.” Elimination, abandonment: we have arrived, as in a circle, back to the original loss, and the central concern of the collection.
Finally, Shin’s APPENDIX contains a single poem which lies outside the collection’s five sections, entitled “L’Etranger | An Unburial | A Funeral.” In this poem, Shin writes, “I had to resort to a concise Wikipedia entry to see all the words for Korean family relationships. Throughout my life I am imagining, constructing, dissolving, and missing these relationships that for me don’t even exist on paper.” The rest of the poem is that very Wikipedia appendix, reproduced in its entirety. Here is Shin’s dictionary, here are her “poetry and bruises.”
If this is so, then through what avenues might one find continuity, find family? How might one belong to a lineage, if not in Western literature, and if not in blood family, from whom a transracial adoptee was so brutally torn? Perhaps— Shin suggests—one might find it within larger systems: with animals, within the mythic and mystic.
For the central pivot of The Wet Hex, the third section and the single longest poem, is a retelling of the Korean myth of Baridegi, the “foremother of shamans.” The poem, “Gaze _ Observatory _ Threshold: A 바리데기 Baridegi Reimagining,” is split into twelve sections, through which the story of the abandoned seventh daughter of a king patiently unfurls, but transformed by the poet’s imagination.
For it is not the queen, but the “king, a man under a gold hole, who gave birth to a second daughter,” and he who abandons her into a jade box. But though the Baridegi myth is one of abandonment, it is also one of redemption, for when Baridegi’s father is at the precipice of death, Baridegi is given a single chance at reunification. She chooses it, saving her father by venturing into the underworld to retrieve the Water of Life from the King of the Underworld. This poem is where all the central concerns of the collection—nature, ancestral lineage, translation, mythology—merge into a single vibrant tapestry: a princess without servants instead uses trees’ “shadow limbs to carry out her duty;” a servants carves “바리데기” into a box; an umbilical cord is “an invisible rope of shame;” a daughter serves as “both a debt and a time machine.” But reunification is possible and does occur; even if only in myth obscured further by poetry; even if at the great cost of nine years of labor and seven sons.
In a poem in the fifth and final section, “Tigermate | Fade In, Fade Out,” Shin writes: “Fact one: tigers are less closely related to lions, leopards, and jaguars than those cats are to each other. / Fact two: The blue whale, the bumblebee bat, and you and I are placental mammals.” Later, she writes:
Mother. Grandmother. Granduncle. Cousin.
Littermate. Ancestral placental mammal.
Each of us had our own personal ocean.
It spilled as we played the lethal game of edibility, impermanence, curse, and cease.
Like a cross between a labyrinth and a night flower, we bloomed.
Died and gave way. Died and gave way.
Wave after wave.
Especially notable about this passage is Shin’s delicate balance of aloneness and continuity. In an ancestral animal, she finally finds “Mother. Grandmother. Granduncle. Cousin,” and though each is separated by an ocean, that gap is still traversable, the ocean “personal” rather than forbidding. But even within this poem, the specter of a final death looms, for the Korean tiger is extinct, “faded quietly into folklore.” And even the “Theory of Descent” which connects all animals to one another remains a “Black Box,” a western theory transformed into a litany of wombs, tunnels, mouths, graves, “marbled hearts,” “placenta[s] buried in the yard.”
The Wet Hex is a dense, intellectual collection of poems. It is also profoundly visceral and intuitive. In it, Shin posits that abandonment cannot be overcome—it can only be endured. But nevertheless, there is hope and continuity to be found, and it both can and cannot reside within the individual, the family, the country, and even across and beyond species.
The Wet Hex is available from Bookshop, Broadway Books, Kinokuniya, Moon Palace Books, Skylight Books, and 27th Letter Books.
Sarah Sukardi is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.