Reviews

Unbearable Splendor by Sun Yung Shin

staplerscissors's review against another edition

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4.0

yeah! solid prose poetry. strong and impactful. Korean, identity, technology, some funny parts, some boring parts.

sapphodemia's review against another edition

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challenging reflective slow-paced

3.0

chillcox15's review against another edition

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4.0

TFW the poet's approximately 67x smarter than u

interlibraryloan's review against another edition

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3.0

whip smart collection of poetry-essay-stories

tinythunders's review against another edition

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brilliant work, even though some of it definitely went over my head. read this while waiting for sunny & renaissance to get their tattoos, in a tattoo parlor in st louis.

glisteningpandas's review against another edition

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5.0

really well done loved the blend of fiction + nonfiction (minotaur, Antigone, Korean history, technological advances, immigration & adoption story, womanhood, etc.) good words nice

hyebitshines's review against another edition

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5.0

picked this one up on a whim from the library’s poetry section (yes, I unconsciously search for Korean // Korean-American poets) and wow, this felt like getting pitched into some super-galactic view of time and the world, narrowing in on Korea. between disrupted lines of genealogy — exploring adoptees and incest — and folklore and a future of cyborgs and countries in the air, I think I could grasp the sense of loss — suffocation — fatalism throughout these various poems, quotes, and excerpts from literature.

600bars's review against another edition

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3.0

this is a very beautiful book, but i'm not very good at reading poetry. i wish i read it 2-3 years ago when i was very obsessed with the themes in here like doubleness and cyborgs and replication and the like. my favorite part was the borges minotaur prison story. i can recognize that this is good stuff but i feel like i've read things w similar themes that i enjoyed more, which prob has more to do with me than with the book.

vfevermillion's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

4.5

leeaf's review against another edition

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4.0

so many rooms, grounded in others’ words . beautiful and chaotic - birth, time, multiplicative selves .