[WFG] Yoon, Emily Jungmin: Find Me as the Creature I Am (HB)

Knopf, hardcover

Publication Date: October 22, 2024

Publisher Marketing: From one of the sharpest up-and-coming voices in American poetry, a stunning collection that explores our most fundamental instincts, capacity for affection, and the ways 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 the ways animals display love and grief alike, Emily Jungmin Yoon holds a mirror up 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 the ways 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.