I want to give more stars... Truly a great book of poetry, capturing so much about our times, yet resting in the arms of love. And the hope to come back as a “beautiful bird.”

My heart pounds for more or to read the book again. Reading one poem, I felt the tears start as if they were pulling out of me, not welling but tugging and pulling. I know poems and styles appeal to different people but this— this is like a mixture of Ada Limón and Gertrude Stein. I know you may not like Gertrude but she gave us a lot to think about, like Emily Jungmin Yoon has.

The book is by Emily Jungmin Yoon, a Korean poet, translator and scholar who lives in Korea and Hawaii. This is not her first book and acknowledges so many people who influenced and helped her with her writing.

Find Me as the Creature That I Am is a brilliant book of poetry. Just a taste from the poem “We do not have to touch everything we love”:

All I am left with is seriousness.
I am busy with everything. Everyone is busy trying
To laugh. The seal and the turtle are trying
to sleep. The dolphins are trying
to sleep. No there is no “eco-friendly” way to swim with dolphins.
We don’t have to touch everything we love.

There is in this book thoughts and feelings about our current crisis of worry about the future and survival. But there is also much about a love for the world and being in love and the longing for life.
#netgalley

Find Me as the Creature I Am by Emily Jungmin Yoon is the kind of poetry collection that grabs you by the heart and doesn’t let go. Yoon’s writing is a delicate balance of tenderness and ferocity, drawing you into a world where the line between human and animal blurs in the most profound ways. Her poems feel like a dance between love and violence, each word chosen with such care that you can feel the weight of it in your bones. The way she weaves family heritage with meditations on the body and the natural world is nothing short of mesmerizing. Yoon reminds us that we are creatures of instinct, capable of both incredible affection and cruelty, and her exploration of these dualities is as beautiful as it is haunting. If you’re looking for poetry that will make you feel deeply connected to both the wildness and softness within us all, this collection is a must-read. It’s raw, it’s intimate, and it’s utterly unforgettable.

I found Yoon's poetry both disturbing and beautiful. She is so honest in what she writes, not backing away from difficult subjects.. I also enjoyed reading her poetry simply because her style is so different from my own, and that is always educational. I look forward to hearing more from her.

Find Me as the Creature I Am by Emily Jungmin Yoon is a haunting and evocative collection that delves into the complexities of identity, womanhood, and the burdens of history. Yoon’s poetry is both fierce and tender, weaving together personal and collective memories with striking imagery and emotional depth. Each poem feels like a raw, unfiltered glimpse into the poet’s soul, exploring the intersections of culture, trauma, and resilience. This collection is a powerful meditation on what it means to reclaim oneself in a world that often tries to define us.

Thank you to Net Galley and Knopf for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. This book will be published on October 22, 2024. These touching poems ranged from belonging and what does Asian American mean, the prejudice that Asians suffered during the pandemic and the mass shooting in Atlanta, how we treat animals and humans, women's bodies and family. They are beautifully written and I very much appreciated the author's perspective.

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publishers for providing me with an ARC of this book !

"Find Me as the Creature I Am" is a beautifully woven collection of poems that explores the nature of people, their experiences, their tendencies, and the aftermath of all those things combined. It narrates familiar feelings and experiences that creatures like us encounter such as love, self-discovery, naiveté, hate, discomfort, and so much more.

Emily Jungmin Yoon broke the mere human down to its rawest components--flesh, blood, and bone. She tore those foundations apart and exposed us for the futile, yet surprisingly adaptive and resilient creatures that we truly are.

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Beautiful, haunting, autobiographical and real poems that hold the attention of the reader and demand to keep it. Covering the topics of womanhood, identity, race, love and family. The poems are sharp and tender, and they make me want to engage more with the author.

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

5 out of 5 stars

Powerful, heartbreaking, enlightening and terrifying, the author examines memory, love, words, race, death, body, self.
My favorites were all of them, but particularly Love and Death Speaking at Once, Elsewhere, and Gala.
Evoking heartache, heartbreak, rage, embarrassment, joy, curiosity, and bewilderment, this is possibly my favorite of the six books I got from NetGalley/Knopf.

"We lit the candles anyway.
We passed the bread. We passed the wine.

If the only world is a hell with my siblings,
I thought, I should feel lucky to call this world home.

Brother,
Sister,

I am here.
I walk with you."

find me as the creature i am by emily jungmin yoon impressed me with title and cover and didn’t stop when i got inside. these poems are sharp and then surprisingly tender. this collection explores themes of family, nature, and body. the imagery is stunning and the message runs deep. i'd recommend these poems to all fans of poetry, and especially those interested in familial relationships and human relationship to nature.

emily jungmin yoon has two previously published collections that i will be tracking down, call me a new fan!

A lovely collection that examines the beast-like qualities in all of us while also examining identity and racism. Some of the poems flowed really nicely with excellent visuals, but there were quite a few references to modern events which indicates to me that they may not age well in the long run. I'm one of those that pop culture references in poetry sometimes draws me out of the flow, however, I think that this is some of the more effective uses for them that I have seen in poetry.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me an eARC for review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

"Find Me as the Creature I Am" by Emily Yoon is a lyrical and thought-provoking poetry collection. As I read through the verses, I found myself drawn into Yoon's exploration of identity.

The poems are rich with vivid imagery and personal reflections that resonated with me on an emotional level. I was especially moved by the pieces that delved into the complexities of cultural belonging and the process of self-discovery in a new environment. For me, this book is a powerful and insightful read.

The author's words about death, specifically her grandmother's embalming and funeral, really point out different cultural attitudes towards death. I also really enjoyed the words that touched on both limited and generalized by terms as part of the Asian diaspora. The way Yoon recounts lived experience is accessible in the sense that you feel like you are in the presence of. past Emily and present Emily.

I once met a taxidermist who described her job not as a process of knowledge-gathering and scientific inquiry, but as a funerary practice: to reposition how one cares in relation to systems of classification.

Emily Jungmin Yoon's newest collection of poems, Find Me as the Creature I Am, follows this impulse, reaching for the ways in which we might re-articulate our relation to grief and racialized identities beyond the bounds of human perspectives. In "All my friends who loved trees are dead," the speaker strolls through the Field Museum, "observing / portraits, protected from the blood, the cutting." Structures of power often tout "humanity" as the thing that distinguishes people from beasts, the thing that places animals behind bars or panes of glass, but what is more inhuman than empire?

Some of these poems follow the usual trajectories of Asian Americana—in one poem, the speaker talks of needing to "scrub clean my alienness so they don't think I, also, have germs, smell disgusting"—in ways that are unsurprising and familiar to those who are well-versed contemporary Asian-American literature. As it stands, Asian-American community as a practice of resistance to Whiteness does not feel like a new or particularly bold claim to make nowadays: the speaker herself demonstrates, in "I leave Asia and become Asian," that it is a long-standing, historically situated relation. But I do think that Yoon's approach is revelatory in the moments when she gestures to the nonhuman world. An unexpectedly moving poem is "Mudflat Story," where the speaker describes the Saemangeum Seawall and the stretch of migratory birds, shellfish, and tides that demonstrate the ways in which creaturely existence can model a life beyond empire and human-made violence.

Overall, I think there are a few loose ends in this otherwise tight-knit collection, and while I might not return to reread this cover-to-cover, I can see myself carrying specific poems and pressing them into the hands of friends. Oh, and the opening piece of this collection is beautiful. Good horse poems are hard to come by these days.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for this ARC!

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for the opportunity to review this Advanced Reader Copy!

Emily Jungmin Yoon's "Find Me as the Creature I Am" is a book of previously published poems collected here and presented with common themes of nature, animals, the body, family, love, and violence. Her poems explore our natural instincts to fight, flee, and be kind or cruel. Yoon shows how we are shaped by our surroundings, blending ideas about nature, family, and love, and it is evident that the collection is a heartfelt and beautifully written work by a rising poet. It is short read, and each poem is only about a page or two long.

Some of my favorite lines are:
- "Her grave is contracted for fifty years, another thing I learn--where our bodies lie are temporary exhibits."
- "My mother studies the soil clinging to the living left behind, my grandmother's trees."
- "I want nothing to change, then wait for my life to change."

I enjoyed certain parts of this collection. While reading it, I saw parallels with my own upbringing and identity as an immigrant and person of color. She writes about how her identity was "reflected and refracted" in ways she "didn't always expect, want or understand" and I feel this deeply when consuming contemporary media. She also writes about how she got a journal so that she could be her own historian in an act of self-preservation against forces that distort and diminish her. As someone who avidly journals myself, I can Identify with this need to feel in control of my narrative. I felt like the author touched on several topics that I found quite beautiful, such as her sick grandmother and the accidentally captured greenland shark. Her poem "Vow" was a beautiful one I can imagine being read in front of a broad audience.

There were parts of the novel that didn't quite resonate with me. I found some of the topics and her personal experiences to be ones that I have heard before, with no new interpretation or fresh perspective. While I have no doubt that her experiences were harrowing and unfortunately all-too-common occurrences (one that I and many of my POC friends have underwent ourselves), I also feel like such experiences are over-described in the literature and media, to the point where, as a reader, I was hoping to see something new. Although, in the author's defense, perhaps the title is a nod to the reader to accept the experiences of the author as true to themself, in which case I could probably be more understanding and less critical. And to the unacquainted reader hoping to learn more about the Asian American and immigrant perspective, these poems might be more illuminating.

I also didn't respond to her jarring references to contemporary events. I'm not sure if it is the topics themselves that feel exhaustive to contemplate as a reader, or if it is simply the discordant ways in which these topics were introduced and described. I found myself experiencing some whiplash in a few of the poems, which seemed to be describing abstract concepts, only to plop the reader back to reality with rather trite, overdone or random references. I understand this could be due to personal preference, and that perhaps this is the author's style, which I am unfamiliar with. The author is highly accomplished, with several awards and a current professorship, which undoubtedly enriches her work. Because of this, I hesitate to dismiss it entirely. However, I feel like many of her poems are lacking in a significant depth. To each their own, and certainly there were some pearls in this book, but the poems largely did not garner strong emotions for me. Overall, I feel that the author is skilled and has decent ideas, although I feel the execution could use some work.

Poignant, raw, and eye-opening. I love the way the author incorporated nature into this collection. This included some heavy topics, like racism and loss, but the writing was beautiful. I was aware of the heightened racism aimed at Asians as a result of the pandemic, but this really humanized it for me (as a white woman who has not directly experienced this). Easily 4 stars!

The beginning of the collection was rough, but once I got to the second part and on, there’s some really smart, beautiful, existential poems to devour. I gave this four stars because the skill and poetic craft of the later poems make up for the rough start. Excited to see what else comes from this poet in the future.

This collection of poetry is stunning. Emily Jungmin Yoon writes from a place of pain. As someone who is also Asian, and part of an immigrant diaspora, who also lived through watching our lives shatter, but realizing that Western colonization and Imperalism forced these things upon us. The mentions of Cathy Park Hong, whose Minor Feelings resonate throughout this work, were difficult to stomach, but the poetry and the lines made it worth it. A beautiful and heartbreaking collection of raw feelings summed up in verse. Teeming with challenging topics like death, racism and what it means to be living in an Asian-American body, when the American part of it betrays us? Beautiful. 10/10.

I really liked Decency and I Leave Asia and Become Asian in my first reading of Emily Jungmin Yoon's poetry.

"when a man threw his fist into a wall next to my eye I said that was love, that love was rage".

Nature, ethnicity, love all play heavily in the verse. There were a couple of poems I didn't care for probably due to the rawness, the hard subjects. But overall a satisfying slim volume of natural poignancy.

Copy provided by the publisher and Netgalley

This was a quick read. The poems were beautiful & very thought provoking. The wit sometimes forced me to slow down and truly appreciate the cleverness of the word choice and set up within some of the selections. I adored the cadence of every single one & will be buying a copy of this. The poems explore topics of life and death, family, racism towards Asians, identify, environmentalism, nature and its connection to us, and love.
4.75 ⭐️

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC!

Replacing the urgency of its predecessor with quiet tenderness, "Find Me as the Creature I Am" sees Emily Jungmin Yoon exploring what it means to be creaturely.

Upon a first read, these poems might strike readers as a little scruffier and scrappier than Yoon’s other work. "A Cruelty Special to Our Species" is so rooted in a particular cultural and historical experience that the shift to universality here might be viewed as simplistic.

However, with a little attention—and this is all the speaker asks for—readers are invited to consider where they fit into their ecosystem. There are still themes surrounding race and embodiment at play in this book, but they are re-contextualized through the lens of a world bigger than humanity. We read about the contrast between "Frozen II" promoting ecological care while its merchandise chokes the ocean, and we encounter the complicated ambiguities of why some animals end their lives when their partners die.

Despite the heaviness of some of the subject matter, this book feels like the relieved recognition that poetry isn’t everything. In “I leave Asia and become Asian”, the speaker follows a complex reflection on race by noting that she is “working on her life” instead of another poetry collection. The statement feels like the origin of many of these pieces, particularly in the way they favor a comfortable immediacy instead of a mechanistic, pre-meditated precision.

In other words, they feel creaturely.

Many of these poems feel like an argument for unburdened and unquestioned love—an animal reflexivity and disinterest in psychological scrutiny. They are quiet "I love yous" in the face of ecological uncertainty.

The world might end; it might not. Either way, the speaker will be with her loved ones.