Skirt Full of Black
Poems by Sun Yung Shin

"Shin's poetry is a grand orchestration of the cacophonic events and voices in an immigrant woman's life. Marked by a keen political consciousness, an imagination as wicked as it is generous, and an erotic, physical sense of language both remembered and forgotten, these poems are at once social critique and personal intimation, worth revisiting again and again."
—Jane Jeong Trenka

Even as the media focuses on the controversies of transnational adoption, little has been heard from the foreign adoptees themselves. In the tradition of Paul Metcalf and Edward Sanders, Sun Yung Shin employs techniques of investigative poetics and collage to uncover the disparities inherent in a bi-cultural childhood, adding her strong and passionate voice to the necessary, growing chorus of transnational adoptees.

Throughout Skirt Full of Black, Shin blends her cultural dualities with an activist's spirit to create a new language for traversing the minefields of identity. In many poems, she traces the intersection of Buddhism and Christianity—the places where the lines of identity and spirituality blur—composing from the mixture a new sense of myth and devotion. And in a personal transformation of the Korean alphabet, she explores the structure and history of the characters while giving each one its own story and meaning.