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Monica Youn Shortlisted for 2023 National Book Award

Tuesday, 3 Oct 2023

From From  From From by Monica Youn has been shortlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry!

Founded in 1950, the National Book Awards recognise the best of American literature across five categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translation and young people's literature. Monica Youn is the only finalist on the current poetry shortlist to have been previously honoured by the awards - she was a finalist in 2020 and on the longlist in 2016.


The National Book Award winners are set to be announced at a ceremony in New York City on 15th November - you can see the full list of finalists here.

Congratulations Monica!




Monica Youn Monica Youn's first UK collection, From From, is her fourth and most ambitious book. It ends with prose, or at least with paragraphs, the long lyrical essay 'In the Passive Voice', and the intense 'Detail of the Rice Chest', explorations of race, identity and belonging seldom so directly broached in poetry, though they are the unspoken theme of much of our silenced discourse. Monica Youn is an undefended poet, which is not the same thing as defenceless. On the contrary, the undefended poet speaks truths without defensive irony. When there is humour it disarms the reader, until we too are undefended and can confront some of the themes we are reluctant to speak of.

The poems recast classical myth in the light of coloniality, otherness and desire, juxtaposing figures which elicit one another's deeper natures. There are metamorphoses, fables. In place of Wallace Stevens's blackbird, Youn proposes 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Magpie', the two-hued bird with a bad reputation.




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