The Wet Hex

Sun Yung Shin

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781566896382
• eBook ISBN:
  9781566896467
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Sun Yung Shin calls her readers into the unknown now-future of the human species, an underworld museum of births, deaths, evolutions, and extinctions. Personal and environmental violations form the backdrop against which Sun Yung Shin examines questions of grievability, violence, and responsibility in The Wet Hex. Incorporating sources such as her own archival immigration documents, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Christopher Columbus's journals, and traditional Korean burial rituals, Shin explores the ways that lives are weighed and bartered. Smashing the hierarchies of god and humanity, heaven and hell, in favor of indigenous Korean shamanism and animism, The Wet Hex layers an apocalyptic revision of nineteenth-century imagery of the sublime over the present, conjuring a reality at once beautiful and terrible.

(Section 1)THERE IS / NEVER / ENOUGH

A Spade Is for Piercing the Ground and a Shovel Is for Heaving

Preparations begin now, in the middle of my life—

death was born with me, didn’t expect to change languages,

might not know when it is called. Sometimes English sits on the surface of the skin.

We are water, we are rivers of descent;

gravity is inevitable yet grievable.

Mourn as you like, death is another migration.

Bring the body home and gently lay it down on its back,

bind tightly the hands and feet of the corpse,

do this to keep it from running away like a lonely child—

carry the coat it wore (when it was a person) to the roof—

a flag of surrender, a signal flag to the spirit world, new arrival;

call out the name of the dead three times.

Perfume the bath water—the death of a thousand flowers—

comb the hair and catch what falls,

what was grown from the body must accompany the body.

Manicure the fingernails and toenails,

carefully reserve the nail trimmings,

the hair and nails are to be collected into five pouches for the coffin.

Obtain a spoon made from a willow tree, it is a lightweight hardwood,

not heavy in the mouth—

feed the corpse three spoonfuls of uncooked rice: one thousand, two thousand, three thousand bushels.

Slide metal coins into the mouth—the spirit journey can be costly, the way long—

cloak the body in the death dress of hemp or silk,

envelop the body with a quilted cloth, and bind the body with ropes seven times.

Transport the body on a decorated bier out of the house—for this you need the living—

observe it float heavily toward the gate. Not unlike a boat

the bier is decorated with fierce dragons and phoenixes; colorful dolls guard the dead.

On the way out of the household premises, lower the bier three times—

the dead’s final departure from home is marked with this ritual bowing.

At the grave, the shaman will exorcise evil spirits from the site. Pay the shaman.

Submerge the coffin in the open ground, it has already been emptied, given its duty,

yes, like another mouth, or a box for a smaller box—one by one,

the ground is a wound that heals, that embraces its lost materials.

Mines and Museums, or, the DMZ Is a Nature Preserve

The wreck of human invention tastes of space

Most borders are invitation of affliction

Most borders make orphans

Mines wind down under a layer of earth like clocks and roots

The ghosts of burned trees dream in Russian

While in the multiverse the mannequins abandon their cosmonaut suits in the museums

What are these trenches but future (museums)

In the weaponry of space; all the earth is a mine

Compactor and gardener of deaths yet to burgeon

Our eyes at the front of our heads to fox and fix

Prey on the horizon; moving as if on a track

Sightlines rings of planetary wax museums; dark matter

In space there are no seasons

Saturn is Rome’s god of agriculture; god of time god of dissolution

Treasury and revelry

The god-milk of temporal adjustments

The gods of role reversals; nurseries and the orphan’s premonitions

A curse requires no special rituals

Another name Sterculius from stercus meaning dung meaning life from death

Meaning shit and sun and seeds

And baptism of your godchild and the drowning the river

The difference between a museum and a tomb

A bomb is not a metaphor

I wore a belt made of ice; I grew with child, a child of ice

and all along—my mother: a glacier, a shipwreck

Behind This Door Is a Siberian Tiger

A child born in the Year of the Tiger

is destined to split apples, collect matchbooks, and speak

the language of fire-in-the-field.

A poet can make the sun jealous.

To use magic to become small, to stow away

in hollow logs, to polish her claws so smooth

they reflect last month’s moonlight.

Let us talk about light. How does your mother

pronounce it. How does your father bury it.

How does your brother borro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Translate This Body into Everything
• (Section 1) There is / Never / Enough
• (Section 2) Violence is not a Metaphor
• (Section 3) The Underworld Holds All Tethers
• (Section 4) Fate is a Debt
• (Section 5) A White Forked Flame
• Appendix: L’Etranger | An Unburial | A Funeral
• Sources
• Acknowledgments