The
Kenyon Review in which I converse with poets about their work and interests both on and off the page. Today’s feature is Jihyun Yun and her debut collection
Some Are Always Hungry (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and which Ada Limón calls “a reckoning with immigration and historical trauma and rooted in the sensorial world, these poems are timeless and ongoing.” A Fulbright research grant recipient, she has received degrees from the University of California–Davis and New York University. Her work has appeared in
Narrative Magazine,
Poetry Northwest,
Alaska Quarterly Review,
Guernica, and
Poets & Writers. Originally from Austin, Texas, she received an MFA from New York University and currently serves as the communications manager at the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses
INTRODUCTION
If I could go back ten years and tell myself one thing about writing, it might be this: You can continue believing in a poem while also questioning and pushing it into a wilder and more emotionally precise version of itself. (Have I learned this yet? I’m trying.) Muriel Rukeyser might have said it best in her 1949 essay collection
The Life of Poetry: “We are poets; we can make the words. The emotional obstacle is the real one.” To me these sentences speak to the writer’s experience in two related ways. First: the hard part of being a writer isn’t just the actual writing it’s also the emotional obstacles, the anxiety and the self-doubt, that arise along the journey from idea to notes to draft to revision to revision to r