3.5 stars

This debut collection was really powerful and I enjoyed the incorporation of traditional food recipes woven with poetry. However, some poems fell flat and felt like fillers.

Stunning poems about food and family, immigration and inheritance, diaspora and the dinner table.
An intimate, raw, and heartbreaking collection of poems.
This not only drew me in with the beautiful cover, but the idea of using food to describe characters, emotions, events and life was just absolutely brilliantly done!

I want to thank NetGalley, the author Jihyun Yun and University of Nebraska Press for providing me with an eARC of this publication. In return, I have promised to provide an unbiased review.

Some very beautiful and touching writing, loved the theme of food. There were a couple of poems that felt weaker and a bit out of place, but overall a great debut collection and definitely an author I'll keep an eye on for future works!
Some of my favourites include "War Soup", "Recipe: 닭도리탕", "My Grandmother Thinks of Love while Steeping Tea" and "Reversal".

An immensely powerful collection: profound and violent both at once. There really is very little to say about this book other than that because Jihyun Yun has left me speechless.

5 stars. I loved this poetry collection. It was haunting and the rhythm of each poem was transcendent and beautiful. Review to come.

Due to being a high school teacher, I often fall behind on writing reviews. Here are my initial thoughts.

I always enjoy poetry when it is a detailed account of a families trials, truths, and triumphs. This was such a great poetry book. I really enjoyed it.

Gripping poetry!
There were some word play that added depth to the poems and it was enjoyable to read.
I only gave it 3 stars because poetry isn’t really my forte.

Some Are Always Hungry by Jihyun Yun

A collection of poems, some of which were so profound (read emotional, violent, relatable and tender) I took breaks in between reading them. Others, I'll need a little more time to appreciate their true meaning... normal for all poetry I guess.

The poems revolve around what it is like being a woman, an immigrant/refugee. The violence and loneliness that comes with it. The idea of a hunger is the best description for this.

The hunger is as physical as it is emotional. Be it trying to survive in a war stricken country with no food to eat or surviving the sexual violence and gaslighting that comes with it. Jihyun has a way with words that just makes you want to cry and wallow in the hopelessness that the persona experiences. The women are of different generations helping assert the idea that abuse is not a monolith. It happens in different forms and the victims develop different coping mechanisms, be it selective amnesia (the mother), violence towards whatever is around (in her case food/animals) or suicide as with the teenager. The reactions are so different. The comparison of the female body to a pig in relation to reproductive rights and autonomy over their own body is the one part that stuck to me. The metaphor was just so obvious and yet not so. I read that and just needed to take a minute. The emotions in the poems are so raw... You can taste the desperation... I held my stomach with the mention of banging it by the kitchen sink. The loneliness of leaving home to a place you thought better that ends up not living up to your expectations then going back home to see that life went on without you. Trying to figure out where home really is.

There is the hunger by by men to consume, control and change female bodies to their own selfish needs. The husband stitch was especially repulsive.

The structure of these poems was also very effective and beautiful, plus the inclusion of the recipe form...chef's kiss. How different the form and structure of one poem was to the next helped in putting in breaks in the flow and foregrounding certain areas.
Definitely going to revisit this book in the near future

well versed book which sparks intimate feelings. I'd recommend it if you need a book that makes you think about stuff that you won't think about in daily life. Just read it.

#SomeAreAlwaysHungry is a collection of poems and an intense book that explores trauma, hunger, pain, desire, and the female body. The author has brilliantly penned and didn’t shy away to express the tiny details and they are a few intense episodes where the reader witness the horrific pain one has gone through for food out of hunger which are heartbreaking.

Author’s writing is lyrical and intense that you are under her spell witnessing through the eyes of Jihyun.
I should definitely talk about the cover; I can’t praise the book cover enough as how gorgeous and Pretty it is.

I would highly recommend this book who love literature.

Thank you #NetGalley for giving this opportunity to read this gem of a book.

I am in the process of expanding my poetry horizons, so take all my poetry thoughts with a grain of salt. That being said Some are Always Hungry was a beautiful collection, full of sorrow and truth. Some of the poems took my breath away.

This collection of poetry is predominantly focussed on the physical and emotional hardships of the immigrant experience, and the ways this trauma can be passed from one generation to the next. The use of language is visceral, the structure playful, and several lines throughout hit me like a sucker punch.

There is such reverence for food in this collection, and I thought this recurring motif was used really effectively. Yun explores the art and ritual of food preparation, celebrating its ability to connect families with their heritage; tastes and smells transporting them to their homeland. But she also comments on the intense, animalistic consumption that is often inherent to those who have known true hunger.

Though deeply personal, the collection pulls back at times to take in wider contextual details, exploring the various factors that can push people to relocate in the first place. War, Occupation, abuse, and poverty are all touched upon, as are the various issues that await immigrants when they reach their new homes, such as racism, language barriers, and a pressure to shed aspects of their identities – even down to their birthnames.

While it’s fair to say there isn’t a huge amount of light to balance the themes’ innate melancholy, it’s an impressive collection overall, and Yun is a poet I’m glad to have discovered.

Lately I’ve started giving poetry genre a long overdue chance they deserve and explored a few very popular and well-hyped poetry books which failed to shine on me its brilliancy.
And now I have a strange, unpredictable winner of best one I’ve read so far. It’s Some are Always Hungry!

Purely due to my want of reading something unexplored yet and its promise of weaving several intricate themes with Korean cuisine (“through the lens of food”, it says), I decided to give it a try.

It blew me away!

Sheer creativity, blunt and raw approach perfectly blended with the use of allegory and metaphors that drove the sharp blade softly to draw a reader’s emotions out, gut-wrenchingly vexed depiction, and unapologetic, defiant representation of Korean culture through “recipes” and cuisine.

Written by an immigrant Korean author Jihyun Yun who lays out various inter-related themes of war, immigration, survival, poverty and hunger, familial ties and culture that threatens to be shredded, womanhood and femineity.

Her prose flow is so brilliant, it was impossible not to get sucked into the delirious world she masterfully sketched out, though I must add, the gory contents may turn off a few sensitive readers.

At first, I started taking notes of my favorite pieces from the book but soon I realized I liked almost all of them very much so I had to stop.

I’ve been interested in all Asian cultures passionately and have been learning Korean for a while. I believe it definitely had a positive reading experience for me that I could understand the few untranslated Korean words easily.

The only thing I disliked and is purely due to my own preference was:
Few proses with the writing style of “……./……/……./” They seems to be “in trend” these days that I just cannot seem to get into. I feel like they tend to lose the gravity and weight of the emotions trying to be conveyed all while getting erratic and fragmentary.

Overall, I would definitely recommend this to:
Every poetry lover, anyone who doesn’t shy away from themes explored in a grim, grisly way, anyone who wants a little taste of Korean food styles and “recipes” (they ain’t your usual, I tell you!), anyone who prefers disturbing yet real depiction of all the themes quoted over flowery ones.

Thanks to NetGalley and University of Nebraska Press for this eARC in exchange for an honest review!

I don't often go for poetry, because I have to be in a certain mood, but this now only drew me in with the beautiful cover, the idea of using food to describe characters, emotions, events and simply life was terribly tempting.

I could identify with this compilation as I also changed cultures and countries, so it was relatable on a whole different level.

It's dark, raw, real and emotional. It hits different.

I would highly recommend to anyone who wants to read more about family, cultures, immigration, survival, struggles.

This poetry collection was awe inspiring and just stunning. Yun's writing flows beautifully and each poem is so raw and invoking of emotion. I loved seeing how it's written like family memories sewn together. Beautifully done, and highly recommended.

First of all, thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy.

Although it was hard to get into, I ended up really liking this collection of poems. Some Are Always Hungry talks about past and present traums in general. More specifically, it delves into:

- the experience of life through war. How did people survive through foreign invasion? did they keep their Korean identity? or did something change? Not to forget also, the aftermath of war (present in most Korean novels and works of poetry to be honest):

"My dear, the war is over.
A distant country tells me we are split."

- the experience of immigrating to a new country. Focus on the immigrant experience of trying to adapt to a new country while keeping your identity and not forgetting about the past. An interesting thing the author does is that she uses recipes as a way of introducing issues that are hard to talk about. Very original and effective I think!

- the experience of being a woman. She addresses menstruation and the stigma that comes with it, unwanted pregnancy, the place of women in society, not standing up to men because afraid to hurt their ego. There are also traces of ecofeminism where she compares her womanly fate to that of pigs who are going to be used for meat. Very interesting to see this parallel that is often ignored, it is something that speaks to me. An excerpt from a poem I really liked:

"At home,Im so happy
to be bledding, I pummel my stomach against
the kitchen counter,
just in case. I know
it doesn't work
that way, but he came without permission and inside.
I'm irrational is what I mean.

Bloodless, others fly
to nearby countries to terminate but I'm too
woman, too poor.

Lord, in this life I'll happily bleed and bleed. Let the animals gnaw through every door. Let the tides overpower."

Overall a good experience. Will pay attention to this author in the future.

A heart-wrenching collection of poetry that covers living through war, immigrating to a new country, and trauma (both past and present). A lot of emotions were explained through passages describing food, which I found to be incredibly effective. Everyone eats food and has their own unique traditions surrounding cooking and dining, so it's a universal experience. Even if your personal experiences with food are not exactly the same, it's an easy language to empathize with. Many of the themes also centered around being female during war/after immigrating, which added an extra layer to the collection. Overall, I found it very powerful and effective in portraying an important story.

Thank you to the publisher, University of Nebraska Press, for sending me a digital ARC of this book via NetGalley.

Although I very much appreciate the opportunity to have read Some Are Always Hungry, I unfortunately did not particularly enjoy the experience. I would have to say that it just “wasn’t my thing”.

Being someone who loves food (Korean food in particular), I found the idea of using food as an anchor in poems with themes ranging from immigration to womanhood to survival to be more than intriguing. However, I failed to connect with the majority of the poems featured here. There were very few that seized my attention or made me stop and think. I did not find myself re-reading anything to soak in the beauty of a line; the poems failed to evoke any emotion in me.

While the book of poetry is a short, quick read, it is unfortunately not one that I would find myself recommending. Again, it may be a 10/10 for someone else, but it was just not my cup of tea.

Powerful poems about war, refugees, immigration, and above all family. All around amazing structure, language, and emotional intensity. Will be returning to these poems again. Some of the forms were also creative, like 'War Soup':

Ingredients
*Pork Belly
*Anchovy Broth
*Instant noodles
*Onion
*Garlic
*Spam
*Hot pepper paste
*American Cheese
*Kimchi

1. In eight cups of boiling water, add dried kelp and anchovy, soaked shitake mushrooms and onion tops to make a broth. Grind four cloves of garlic together with hot pepper paste, soy and sugar for seasoning. Set the mixture aside for later.

2. Onion carpeted in pork fat and rice wine flared, very briefly, an ignited landscape. Then sun-dried pepper flakes staining the oil, a sundry of roots tossed in at rough dice, zucchini cut to half-moons, halved and quartered heads of kimchi. The stock should not disappoint, heavy with anchovy and odd bits. Set it all to boil, no witness, low heat.

3. We’ve not long been able to afford this: life giving flesh, singed wire hair that remembers outhouse and apple core. The fat ripples its own horizon, studded white over pink meat, cartilage wedged there where the muscle gathers. Cut the slabs into mince, light those dented pots.

4. Dear family I left behind
in the northern province of my birth,
do you live as I feed and am fed
have they given you to sea?

5. Then Spam, more tofu than animal, cut to cubes. Say, we made do with what we did. At the bases, the Americans gave cans of beans or meat. We weren’t picky, boiled it all with weeds and scraped carcass. We called it Johnson-tang, rejoiced like we’d never again need to eat, as if the miles were no real thing. Now chili, now green onion sprigs.

6. The northern village of my birth, a storm crushed window. The gaunt faces of my people parade the TV screen; dear lord, dear leader.

7. Let the noodles wilt
over broth just before serving.
At the table, over kerosene flame,
three generations tend to the pyre
that feeds and feeds.

What a blessing,
to have passed through hunger.
I will teach my daughters
to bare their palms.
I will teach them how to beg.

Some Are Always Hungry by Jihyun Yun

Yun's debut book of poetry uses food, hunger, and the rituals around them to tell a story about war, immigration, and second-generation unease with verve and novelty. The framing surprised me in how effectively it worked, how broad a range of metaphors she was able to deploy. From food as love to food as debasement, from the delight of a homecooked dish to the cruelty of slaughter, Yun's poems span so many facets of hunger and eating that I was astonished to keep discovering new ways to understand a familiar story.

Yun's poems describing the deprivation experienced by her grandparents during the Korean war and the everyday humiliations and challenges experienced by her mother as a new immigration are particularly effective; they are rich with detail and wise with perspective.

I found Yun's use of visceral imagery, almost savage in their precision and sparing no one, particularly affecting, as are her vivid and loving descriptions of the ingredients used in Korean cooking. The poems set up as recipes (or reverse recipes) are clever in their form, but what will stay with me are the indelible images: a broth of leftovers boiled white, a pig's dismembered head, a table laden with foods that are inedible to mainstream America but are still only comfort, only nourishment, only the things you crave.