“Find Me as the Creature I Am” (Ecco, 2024) is Emily Jungmin Yoon’s second full-length poetry collection following the successful debut of “A Cruelty Special to Our Species” (Ecco, 2017).

(Her book titles alone pop curious bubbles of my literary curiosity!)

Joon’s poetry traverses the liminality of grief and loss, passion and violence, comfort and compromise. In communion with nature, memory, and family history, she creates a lyrical landscape of gravel, shark teeth, and “Gray Area” mud.

“Find Me as the Creature I Am” is ripe with thought-provoking, contemplative questions found in the very best poetry and prose. In “Body Of,” she asks about her body’s existence beyond being a vessel for birthing babies. What of her brain? Her heart?

If you enjoy reading poetry by Victoria Chang, Joy Sullivan, or Maya C. Popa, this might be the book for you.

Thank you to Emily Jungmin Yoon, Ecco, and Netgalley for the eARC.

this was IT for me!

thank you netgalley and the publisher for the eARC!!!

i haven’t been excited by a contemporary poetry collection … perhaps ever, but especially not like this. each poem takes up its own unique space in the collection and i found the conversation that the text has both with itself and with me as the reader to be exactly the conversation that i’ve been needing to have recently.

this is beautifully written and the blending together of the experience of life on earth that of being in love and being a young woman is something that i have yet to see written about in such a way. i simply have to find me of emily jungmin yoon’s poetry because this collection is a new favorite!

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for sending me an eARC of this book.

I've read Emily's work here and there over the years, but this is my first dive into a complete collection. The poems were raw and spoke deeply to me. The language sweeps you in and carries you throughout the collection, as you feel a wave of different emotions. I really enjoyed this but will definitely be returning to this book to re-read and frame some of the poems on my office wall!

Find Me as the Creature I Am is a volume of poetry about family, the body, animals, and more This is my first read by Emily Jungmin Yoon. I found the poems moving and the perspective fresh, with striking imagery. I recommend this book highly for other poetry readers.

Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this book!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this as an ARC!

I'm never sure how to rate or talk about poetry (I feel like I start off each review like this lol). To me, poetry is supposed to be an elevation of the subject in a nearly superfluous way. This is not that. And that is not a dig at her work! At all! Her poems were very conversational, as though she was sitting across from me just talking about it. It's not a style I prefer, but I think it worked well for the topics she discussed. In fact, handling them in the way I prefer likely would've been the wrong way to go, as it would end up removing the realistic aspect and basically been a disservice to her past, experiences, and the topics touched upon.

My main qualm is that the first poem ends in a moment that the second poem is entirely about, and it threw me off as the emotions within the two come across very different. I did a double take and needed a moment to reassess.
A second issue I had was the one poem that related to horses. I'm very much a horse girl and found it to be a stretch to relate the two, but I think that's because I know just too much about horses. It may also be related to a small, recent sourness due to being dumped into a wall by my own horse literally two days before! Horses aren't so majestic when they gift you giant purple bruises lol. And they certainly don't come across as "tame" in that moment either!

Overall, I would recommend this collection of poetry.

It's been a hot minute since I devoted some time to read poetry, but Emily Jungmin Yoon's upcoming release did not disappoint.

Find Me as the Creature I am is a unique poetry collection exploring identity, trauma, and transformation. Using mythological and animal imagery, Yoon reflects on her experiences as a Korean immigrant, weaving personal and collective stories of displacement, resilience, and self-discovery.

I can't begin to relate to the experiences of marginalization Yoon shares through some of her poetry, but my husband is Korean and my youngest daughter is half Korean. So, my hope is that this helps me better understand those deep feelings around identity and be an ally for them and others in the community.

A huge thank you to @aaknopf and @netgalley for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

This deeply reflective collection of poetry is deft and evocative – ranging from universally human and existential subjects to specific cultural experiences, it demonstrates the author’s acutely attuned perspective on the world and how we navigate it (for better or worse).

While the collection starts off strong, it gets a little meandering and cumbersome in the back half. However, it ends on an eerily prescient final poem (from which the title is derived) that does a lot to underscore the talent for imagery and observation that Yoon wields.

I really wanted to love this collection more because it came from an Asian poet, but I struggled to connect with the voice of the speaker and some of the formatting and through lines. Though I really enjoyed the definition poem “Body of,” a lot of this collection seemed more stream of consciousness/musings on current events than anything else. I agree with the overall message, but I feel like the genuine emotionality is missing something here.

In this short collection of poetry, Yoon contemplates life, death, nature, race/racism, love, and the purpose of writing. While at times her poetry confronts difficult truths, readers are left with a sense of hope. The final poem, “Next Lives,” has me thinking about the future. About endings. About how we don’t really know what comes next. That’s the beauty of this collection. The poems are rooted in Yoon’s personal experiences, and there’s a call to appreciate the world and call out its injustices. I see myself reading this again and again (I’ve already read it twice) and using it in my classroom. I’m looking forward to reading more of Yoon’s work!

This collection was very eye opening, it taught me a lot. My favorite poem is the one titled decency, which I feel was the highlight of the collection.

I read this is one sitting - beautifully done. I particularly enjoy when a body of work feels so intimate to the author and still deeply emotional for the reader. I've read a lot of great poetry this year that I have learned from, but most didn't quite reach my heart. Find Me as the Creature I am did both.

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the digital arc. All opinions my own.

Find Me as the Creature That I Am by Emily Jungmin Yoon is a powerful collection of poetry. Living between Korea and Hawaii, Emily expresses gratitude to those who influenced her journey. The poems delve into themes of belonging, the complexities of the Asian American experience, and the discrimination endured during the pandemic and the Atlanta mass shooting. They also examine the treatment of animals, humanity, women’s bodies, and the dynamics of family. With nature, ethnicity, and love woven throughout, Emily’s writing evokes a raw and poignant emotional impact. Despite touching on difficult subjects, the collection is deeply satisfying and leaves a lasting impression.
Thank you to Net Galley and Knopf for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Gorgeous! I'm familiar with Yoon's other work and this collection is just as beautiful, I love the ongoing meditation on climate catastrophe and nature threaded in so many other thematic throughlines. The images and individual word choices echo long after finishing.

Thank you to Knopf via NetGalley for providing me a copy of this ARC! Although this is a short book of poems, they are enduring. Emily Jungmin Yoon writes of both everyday mundane experiences and of the extraordinary. She writes what it feels to grieve, to love, to hate and to be hated all so effortlessly and yet so vibrantly. This is the second of her works I have read and have already added the other to my to be read list!

This was an extraordinarily strong book of poems.

Emily Jungmin Yoon has a strong sense of place even when she is being pulled by many places (and even times) at once. These poems all seemed to explore what being in a place meant for not only her (or you or anyone) but the place itself. I know that the main theme of this collection is animal and that runs rampant throughout and is very interesting and compelling but I found the theme of place even more interesting and very relevant and compelling.

In the first poem All My Friends Who Loved Trees are Dead she talks of her grandmother, whom she and her family are at the funeral of and how her grandmother could forecast the weather, a thing you can only be good at when you are preternaturally attuned to the world you are in. She precedes to move on to point out the temporariness of ever being in a place even after one has died talking about how even resting places are contracted.

Another poem I absolutely loved was Litany for the Green. This one centers on her grandfather and his relationship to a sacred place he took the author to when she was young and then proceeded to let her play there.

My very favorites were the last few as she explores love and how it grounds us too, and how we reach to hold it and keep it even beyond our mortal lives.

This was a very strong and enjoyable book for me.

I received an ARC from NetGalley.

this transported me to elsewhere upon pretty words and a soothing rhythm. The epilogue poem alone earns this another star. Very timely and culturally relevant and important

A beautiful and thoughtful collection on the body and its beastly qualities, diving into race, identity, and relationships, both carnal and familial.

What is the body but a pair of hooves or claws to rip through the brushes of life? I could not help but think what it is I am meant to do on this puny planet outside of survival. But Yoon shows us that we are much more beyond survival. We are work. A piece of work.

“We’re working on our lives.”

A beautiful book of poetry. This book dives into life, love, and the complications within it.

Thank you #netgalley for giving me a early read!

I really enjoyed this collection of essays, and found so many to be very personally relevant and moving. This was my first time reading Emily Jungmin Yoon's work and I'm so excited to read more.

5 stars

Emily Jungmin Yoon is a completely new writer to me, but I am looking forward to getting much more familiar with this work. These poems feature a fresh voice, ecocritical insights, and emotional depth. I also found them extremely accessible, which means they meet my most important need for any new (to me) poetry collection: teachable.

I'm really looking forward to teaching some of these to my college students and to reading more from this writer.