Ward toward

Book Cover
Average Rating
Publisher
Yale University Press
Publication Date
[2024]
Language
English

Description

Yale Younger Poet Cindy Juyoung Ok resolutely searches for hope in spaces of fragmentation  Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book, 2024 • Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, 2024   “There are places,” Cindy Juyoung Ok writes, “where shaking is expected, loss is / assumed.”   In the 118th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok moves assuredly between spaces—from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided countries to hospice wards. She plumbs these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of each reality’s language, word to word, as she uncovers fractured private codes and shares them in argument, song, and prayer.   Using visual play in invented forms, Ok counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person’s character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. The poems disrupt expectation with the comedy of institutionalized teens, nostalgia after the climate crisis, tenderness in a nursing home, and the wholeness of faltering Englishes. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Ok’s resolute, energized debut shifts language’s fissures to reassemble them into a new place of belonging.

More Details

Contributors
Armantrout, Rae,1947- author of foreword
ISBN
9780300273922
9780300273915

Table of Contents

From the Book

Foreword by Rae Armantrout
I.
Three act comedy
Orientation
Laugh track
"P.S. please forgive poor grammar"
Moss and marigold
Before the DMZ
Fissured
The orders
Pale music
Terms and conditions
The tyranny of representation
I was a highly awarded
Clustering
Park Street
Composition of a raft
Surviving inklings
II. Tally of what names
Ward of one
The five room dance
Shakeout
Nap plot
Patch
Leave her to heaven
Ten sessions
Ten sessions
It is like
Ten words
In Atlanta
Bartender's bargain
Rights
Table of contexts
Curtain
III. The end of crisis
Home ward
Sunset, glory
River
Mama I am sorry
Faint
Setting
Sheds
"How is temperature in east?"
Ceremony
Answering my great-grandmother
Degeneration
Signs
Home ward
At the end
Residue guidelines.

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Author Notes

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Published Reviews

Publisher's Weekly Review

Winner of the 2023 Yale Younger Poets Prize, Ok in her refreshing debut uses language to push against the staid edges of the status quo, exposing the tenuous and often contradictory beliefs that seemingly undergird reality. With their capacious perspective, these verses bear witness to the hypocrisies of convention on the personal and global scale. A concrete poem titled "Before DMZ" takes the shape of the Korean peninsula before its split into North and South, formally echoing that geopolitical bifurcation in the piece's two halves, while also exploring the speaker's complex family ties and calling into question the forces continuing to ensure such a split: "My/ moth-/er sent/ a photo of/ the federal build-/ ing she was/ being naturalized in,/ writing Boring I/ love you. That winter,/ her father revealed he left/ behind a first wife, two kids, north/ before the war." Ok regularly makes startling connections that invite readers to reexamine their circumstances: "My country is broken, is estranged, is trying, we write,/ as though there is such a material as a country, as/ though the landlord doesn't charge rent for life lived/ outside the house." Ok's brave and idiosyncratic debut challenges institutionalized reality as it gestures toward the possibility of freedom. (Mar.)

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Publishers Weekly Reviews

Winner of the 2023 Yale Younger Poets Prize, Ok in her refreshing debut uses language to push against the staid edges of the status quo, exposing the tenuous and often contradictory beliefs that seemingly undergird reality. With their capacious perspective, these verses bear witness to the hypocrisies of convention on the personal and global scale. A concrete poem titled "Before DMZ" takes the shape of the Korean peninsula before its split into North and South, formally echoing that geopolitical bifurcation in the piece's two halves, while also exploring the speaker's complex family ties and calling into question the forces continuing to ensure such a split: "My/ moth-/er sent/ a photo of/ the federal build-/ ing she was/ being naturalized in,/ writing Boring I/ love you. That winter,/ her father revealed he left/ behind a first wife, two kids, north/ before the war." Ok regularly makes startling connections that invite readers to reexamine their circumstances: "My country is broken, is estranged, is trying, we write,/ as though there is such a material as a country, as/ though the landlord doesn't charge rent for life lived/ outside the house." Ok's brave and idiosyncratic debut challenges institutionalized reality as it gestures toward the possibility of freedom. (Mar.)

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