“The Limit Does Not Exist”: Betsy Aoki, Zeina Hashem Beck, Sun Yung Shin & Yanyi

Yanyi is a writer, critic, and the author of The Year of Blue Water. His work has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, in Tin House, Granta, A Public Space, and at the New York Public Library. Currently, he is a poetry editor at Foundry and giving creative advice at The Reading. The poems in Yanyi’s Dream of the Divided Field (One World) suggest that we enter and exit our old selves like homes. We look through the windows and recognize former aspects of our lives that are both ours and not ours. We long for what we had even as we acknowledge that we can no longer live there. Yanyi conjures the beloved both within and without us: the beloved we believe we know and is never the person we imagine, and the beloved who threatens to erase us even as we stand before them. Informed by Yanyi’s experiences of immigration, violent heartbreak, and a bodily transition, Dream of the Divided Field explores the contradictions that accompany shifts from one state of being to another. The tender, serene, and ethereal poems examine a body breaking down and rebuilding in limitless and boundary-shifting ways.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki is a poet, fiction writer, and video game producer. Her debut poetry collection, Breakpoint (Tebot Bach), was a 2019 National Poetry Series finalist. Dedicated to “all the women in tech making it happen,” Breakpoint combines intense lyrical free verse with found Python “code poems” to explore the modern technological and societal landscape. Aoki brings the reader into her world of polygons and fractals, Japanese folklore and family stories, computational language and robot factories, and the timeless yearning to be seen clearly. The machines speak in this book, but more strongly, the voices of women in tech rise in the rooms where they are creating the future.

Sun Yung Shin is a Korean-born poet, writer, collaborative artist, and bodyworker. They are the editor of What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories on Food and Family and A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota; the author of the poetry collections The Wet Hex (Coffee House Press), Unbearable Splendor, Rough, and Savage: Poems, and Skirt Full of Black; co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption; and author of Cooper’s Lesson, a bilingual illustrated book for children. Personal and environmental violations form the backdrop against which Shin examines questions of grief, 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 19th-century imagery of the sublime over the present, conjuring a reality at once beautiful and terrible.

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet and the author of two previous full-length collections of poetry – Louder than Hearts and To Live in Autumn – and the chapbooks 3arabi Song and There Was and How Much There Was. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is also the co-creator and co-host with poet Farah Chamma of Maqsouda, a podcast about Arabic poetry produced by Sowt. Educated in Arabic, English, and French, she has a bachelor’s degree and an M.A. in English literature from the American University of Beirut. In O (Penguin Books), Hashem Beck writes at the intersection of the divine and the profane. There she crafts elegant, candid poems that simultaneously exude a boundless curiosity and a deep knowingness. Formally electrifying – from lyrics and triptychs to ghazals and duets, in which English and Arabic echo and contradict each other – O explores the limits of language, notions of home and exile, and stirring visions of motherhood, memory, and faith.