Unbearable Splendor

by Sun Yung Shin

Sun Yung Shin moves ideas—of identity (Korean, American, adoptee, mother, Catholic, Buddhist) and interest (mythology, science fiction, Sophocles)— around like building blocks, forming and reforming new constructions of what it means to be at home.

What is a cyborg but a hybrid creature of excess? A thing that exceeds the sum of its parts. A thing that has extended its powers, enhanced, even superpowered.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Science Fiction, Adoption

112 pages, Paperback

Published October 11, 2016

About the author

신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, spent her early years in the Chicago area, and is now based in Minneapolis. She is the award-winning author of thirteen books for adults and children. She is 2026 McKnight Foundation Fellow in Creative Prose and a recent finalist for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her newest picture book Revolutions are Made of Love: The Story of Grace Lee Boggs & James Boggs is available for pre-order wherever books are sold, and will be available on November 4, 2025; her nonfiction book Heart Eater: A Memoir of Immigration is forthcoming in 2026. Her poetry has been included in the 2021 Gwangju Biennale and she was an invited presenter at the Korean Literary Translation Institute's 2018 conference on Korean diasporic literature. She is a frequent speaker and keynote presenter in community spaces and at academic conferences, most recently at the University of Salamanca, Spain, and University of Joensuu, Finland. She is on the advisory board for the Immigrant Writing Series at Black Lawrence Press. For more about her work, please visit sunyungshin.com or follow her on Substack, Instagram, Facebook, and Threads.

Reviews

[Lauren]

"Our country, a people with a continuous history of over five thousand years, has been left divided since the end of the Korean War, that peninsula-wide trauma that resulted in tens of thousands of children being made available to the West, first to the US..."

From "Exactly Like You" (poem/essay) from the collection UNBEARABLE SPLENDOR by Sun Yung Shin, 2016

▫️A truly innovative and experimental work of poetry, essay, linguistics, dialectics, and speculative work.

Sun Yung Shin blends her own biography as a transnational / transracial adoptee (born in Korea, raised by a white family in the US) into many metaphors and myths - calling up Greek myths of Antigone, Korean creation stories, Russian folk tales, and science fiction / speculative elements like singularity, cyborgs and clones, and the imaginings of what a fetus dreams in the womb.

Fiercely intellectual, intense, varied in tone and theme. Her poems and micro-essays are anchored by the quotes of those before: Victor Hugo, Franz Kafka, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jorge Luis Borges, Carl Jung, and script quotes from modern classic sci-fi films like Blade Runner and Alien.

Was very impressed with this collection, although I didn't comprehend it all - but that's not the aim in reading poetry.

Sun Yung Shin has some earlier collections (also from Coffee House) that I want to check out too...

[Jimmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book deals with personal issues of displacement, adoption, being an orphan, being a foreigner in a series of poetic essays which reference everything from Greek mythology to Blade Runner to Kafka. It reminded me a bit of Anne Carson in method, though the execution fell a little short. It is a brave concept, but I felt like she didn’t take enough leaps. Many times, her metaphors felt strained, as if she needed everything to connect back to her overall theme instead of letting it go wherever it took her. It felt very "project-y". And when she was writing actual lined/fragmented poetry, I did not connect to it at all. I tended to connect to her prose / essay bits a lot more.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the intersection of poetry and essay, Sun Yung Shin’s startling evocations of cosmology, linguistics, Korean and Greek mythology, literature and machine intelligence, are exhilarating.

[fromcouchtomoon · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's uncanny how scifi this is.

[boocia]

a really good time. does probably get better if you know more about greek mythology/literature. it has that pleasing quality of not exactly being a collection of poetry as much as being one united piece of work that is entangled and builds on each other.

i think my favorite thing about it is how much it wrestles with identity, and specifically identity in the case of being captured (poem where the minotaur's keeper starts becoming the minotaur), or a host/guest, or a stranger. sun yung shin herself is a korean american who was adopted by white americans at a young age, and that's definitely something i felt the need to read into these poems. there's something a little dangerous but v sexy about her conclusions like in Seventh Sphere: "Shields down and the word enemy will pass from memory. You are my kind.". It feels like a good less-antagonistic followup to Aase Berg's hackers, parasite replaced with guest, or maybe just the overloading of the term 'host'. Something v compelling about a woman / non-white person saying 'you are of a kind as me' as opposed to a man/white person. a subversion of a sort. Unbearable Splendor is also explicitly about the cyborg manifesto ("Is Antigone the original cyborg?" starts one poem); i do think sometimes she's painting a little wide (Antigone is partially considered a cyborg by shin because she's liminal - half in death from the start, but lots of things are liminal ); but in general this meditation on the void/twisting where origin should be (trans-racial adoption; or Antigone being a product of incest) throughout is v good.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is a very beautiful book, but i'm not very good at reading poetry. i wish i read it 2-3 years ago when i was very obsessed with the themes in here like doubleness and cyborgs and replication and the like. my favorite part was the borges minotaur prison story. i can recognize that this is good stuff but i feel like i've read things w similar themes that i enjoyed more, which prob has more to do with me than with the book.

[H]

This is a thought-provoking and moving book about the impermanence of identity, the enigma of time, and a whole host of other big ideas addressed in an accessible structure--namely, short pieces that mix together different forms and documents. Shin is excellent at measuring gaps, like the ones between:

-The uncanny and the canny (see the mind-bending chart below)
-Her father and herself ("I see my father every time I look in the mirror but I wouldn't recognize him on the street")
-Women and men (one of the book's epigraphs is this Carl Jung quote: "A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.")
-The "strangers, exiles, and pseudo exiles" and the indefinable blank notion of "normal"

Highly recommended for those looking for writing that unites short, curious, meditative bursts from many different directions to wrestle one idea too big to tackle otherwise.

[echo]

chyba nie potrafię traktować języka jako celu samego w sobie i w eseistyce potrzebuję CZEGOŚ, czegokolwiek, czego mogę się złapać, czego mogę się dowiedzieć, co uzasadnia istnienie tekstu, który czytam, nawet jeśli brzmi ładnie — bo ładność nie wystarcza — to początek, pokaz stylu, część rzemiosła, którego główna trudność leży w tym, żeby prezentacja wchodziła głębiej w osobę czytającą, wywoływała w niej nie tylko zachwyt umiejętnościami autorki, ale też refleksję nad życiem, ponieważ naiwnie uważam, że jeśli literatura mnie nie zmienia, to zmarnowałem czas; przekładam nad dobrą zabawę duchowe przeżycie składania liter

w tekście Sun Yung Shin otrzymałem ładne słowa i zalążki refleksji nad tematami, które autorka rozrzuciła i nie pozbierała; „Blade Runner” leży obok koreańskiego mitu antropogonicznego, obok Sofoklesa (Antygona jako pierwotny cyborg, fajnie, przeczytałbym o tym esej, ale zobaczyłem zamiast niego rozklejone urywki akapitów, podczas gdy Donna Haraway cytowana na początku książki miałaby do powiedzenia znacznie więcej o cyborgicznych właściwościach buntowniczej postaci z antycznej tragedii), obok niejasnych rozważań lingwistycznych o gościach, czarnych dziurach i adopcji — i bardzo chcę podziwiać takie pisanie, bo uwielbiam formę podania, ale nie potrafiłem, mimo starań, wgryźć się we wrażliwość autorki przez brak punktów zaczepienia; ześlizgiwałem się ze zdań i rozdziałów, i czuję, że niepotrzebnie zabierałem się za tę książkę

kiedy czytam takie rzeczy, odechciewa mi się pisać, a to największe niepolecenie, jakie mogę dać

unbearable: tak
splendor: niezbyt

[Danni Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm reading a lot of trans poetry lately and am really into it, but this one is a whole other dimension of artistry. I read it a couple weeks ago and can't stop thinking about it! I might have to read it again before I return it to the library (not my usual reading behavior; typically I'll read something, return it, wait a while, and THEN reread). I want to soak it up into my SOUL.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

so many rooms, grounded in others’ words . beautiful and chaotic - birth, time, multiplicative selves .

[Tonymess · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is essay? In recent years I have been exploring the fiction form and the boundaries being pushed in the fictional format. Recently I have noticed an inordinate number of new essay collections hitting the shelf. Is the factual argument or the exploration of a subject via experimental means lesser of an essay? I recently reviewed Brian Blanchfield’s “Proxies; Essay’s near knowing” where personal restriction was put in place (for example, no research whilst writing each essay), this collection was vibrant, exciting, thought provoking and thoroughly enjoyable. Can others also experiment with the form for similar results?

As mentioned in my recent post about Arno Schmidt’s “Bottom’s Dream”, reading such a dense, complex and large book poses mental and physical restrictions. Generally I read one book from start to finish, pick up something that seems to suit the flow of my previous reading and then complete the new one, and continue ad-nauseum. A few “breaks” by participating in Women In Translation Month or Spanish Literature Month or other style read-alongs can break the flow I’m in and set me off on a new tangent. As regular visitors here would know I have been primarily focused on Latin American, South American literature for quite a few months now, and switching to the German was a massive cultural shift. Given the sheer size of “Bottom’s Dream” it is not a book I take to read on my daily work commute, I’m therefore breaking up the Germanic, at the moment, with various essay, short story or poetry collections. Regular visitors here will notice that over the comings weeks or months my posts will be reviews of books of the shorter form, although I do have a few unwritten reviews from novels read (and heavily notated) which I may get to write up and post.

For my essay reading I referred to a recent post at Book Riot titled “25 Great Essay Collections from 2016” http://bookriot.com/2016/09/20/25-gre... – a number simply didn’t take my fancy as they appeared to address American History, or the blurb indicated a severe case of narcissism (“It tells stories about growing up and coming to understand her intelligence, her role as a writer, and her place in the world.”), I culled the list to six, yes I was savage in my culling process.

The first collection off the pile was Sun Yung Shin’s “Unbearable Splendor”. As publisher Coffee House Press tells us, “Sun Yung Shin is the author of poetry collections Rough, and Savage and Skirt Full of Black, which won an Asian American Literary Award. She coedited the anthology Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and is the author of Cooper’s Lesson, a bilingual Korean/English illustrated book for children”. With their blurb of the book saying, “Poetry as essay, as a way of hovering over the uncanny, sci-fi orientalism, Antigone, cyborgs, Borges, disobedience.”


For my full review go to Unbearable Splendor – Sun Yung Shin | Messenger's Booker (and more)
https://messybooker.wordpress.com/201...

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems about cyborgs, clones, replicants, fetuses and other genetics are spliced and coupled together with a brilliant riff, let's call it a short story, upon Borges' "The House of Asterion". The quality of the prose from this story shows Sun Yung Shin could make tremendous noise (trumpet blasts!) in that form as well. While there were notable misses for me (the Antigone poems probably needed the inclusion of the essays they were inspired from), the whole is an impressive testament to humanity's friction with its various created selves, esp. through the rise of technology.

[scriptedknight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4/5 stars
~
I picked this up after one of my classes at my university, a stack of them laying on a table outside the english department's office. Even though it came just in time for AAPI month and celebrating these talented authors, reading the book was more about just checking off that I had read from an author associated with this month.

Unbearable Splendor is an enigma; taking different topics that seemingly don't match up until they do, Sun challenged the way we look at orphans and the unborn. Using stories from across time to make us understand, Sun isn't here to wax poetics as much as she is here to tell her story as close to what she feels is possible, and that is something incredible.

[Eun Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

picked this one up on a whim from the library’s poetry section (yes, I unconsciously search for Korean // Korean-American poets) and wow, this felt like getting pitched into some super-galactic view of time and the world, narrowing in on Korea. between disrupted lines of genealogy — exploring adoptees and incest — and folklore and a future of cyborgs and countries in the air, I think I could grasp the sense of loss — suffocation — fatalism throughout these various poems, quotes, and excerpts from literature.

[Logan Plonski · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw Sun Yung Shin speak, and she seemed so intelligent and intense that I had to read her book of poetry. This book was very unusual and thought-provoking, consisting of pictures, chunks of prose, and stream-of-consciousness. It incorporated themes of duality and the concept of self while adapting stories from Greek mythology and science fiction imagery. I probably didn't understand a lot of it but I really liked it.

[Jennifer Stoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's extremely academic in many ways. Like, there's part of me that gets it on that "for a transracial international adoptee, the self is necessarily split in many ways. Why not map that split self onto the cyborg, that illegitimate hybrid?" level but the other part of me is like "I feel like I need to read this with five different works of theory to really get it and I'm not sure I have the ability to put that into reading anymore."

[Iffazu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sun Yung Shin’s Unbearable Splendor is a collection of poetry & essays on identity, mixed in with references from mythology & sci-fi.

overall, i like the way the author structure their thoughts into these proses that they wrote. and it’s mostly a plus cuz i’m a sci-fi/mythology/cosmology nerd that it all fits into a poetry-essay theme that i’m into.

there are some poems that i don’t relate to but appreciate all the same! ✨

[James Grinwis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tough and lovely intricacies of the classiccal and the speculative including the minotaur, Antigone, Blade Runner replicants, clones, mannikins, Pinnochio, surrogates, dream examination and psalmistry: a cerebral and compelling map of duality and identity and transformation. Many of the prose poems in here, while tied to a larger project, I find outstanding in their own terms.

[Zach Werbalowsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intense, complicated book warranting another reading since I sort of grazed through it as opposed to taking it all in. Beautifully written, the style had a grasp on me, the experimental nature of it has me having to step back.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was like no other poetry book I've ever read. Fiercely intellectual and, at the same time, a bit playful. Her unique and thorough way of looking at what it means to be human was so enjoyable to just take it

[Karen Carlson]

Sam Cha wrote about it in his collection The Yellow Book; it's a poetry book, but it's more than that, it's got diagrams and the way he talks about it makes me willing to think about reading another poetry book.

[Victors · Rating 4 out of 5]

yeah! solid prose poetry. strong and impactful. Korean, identity, technology, some funny parts, some boring parts.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

TFW the poet's approximately 67x smarter than u

[Tucker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I especially loved the Minotaur. Wonderfully weird stuff.

[Curtis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A hybrid of poetry and essay, Unbearable Splendor is interesting and complex in ways I don't fully understand. A slow burner.

[Steven Felicelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

heavily influenced by Haraway's Cyborg manifesto, this book is kind of amazing - the image of a perhaps-real cyber-Pinocchio is a real head-spinner

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good.

[T.J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

We are all time travelers. We travel at the speed of one hour every hour, one year every year.

[luna rey hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite poem: Singularity

“Now, like children who want to live long enough to become adults, some of whom are in peril of living and dying as children, I know better than to make a sound.”

[ghostlypicnic · Rating 5 out of 5]

really well done loved the blend of fiction + nonfiction (minotaur, Antigone, Korean history, technological advances, immigration & adoption story, womanhood, etc.) good words nice