Skirt Full of Black
Reviews

Asian American Press:
“An enlightening perspective with which to understand the emotional toll on the adoptee.”

Curve Magazine:
“Some of the most stunning new poetry to come out this year.”

Dave Wood’s Book Report, River Falls Journal (syndicated in several Minnesota and Wisconsin newspapers):
“Skirt Full of Black . . . celebrates language as an exhilarating tool which provides the troubled spirit means to heal and be heard.”

Galatea Resurrects:
“Experimental, exceptional, vibrant, and highly recommended.”

Luna Magazine:
“The beauty of this book is that we are always slipping into new forms and new styles with and within each poem. . . . Part of what a reader walks away with is the idea of the ambidextrous voice: a voice that . . . can distill space and time into beautiful, abstract, tight-knit impressions that challenge the relationship between American English and Korean, language and sound.”

Minnesota Literature:
“[Shin] maps out a language for the experience of loss and fracture that has emerged as a common theme of the Korean diaspora. . . . these poems are wonderfully imaginative and haunting.”

mnartists.org:
“Skirt Full of Black is a fascinating addition to the nascent Korean American canon, exploring the interstices of language, power and culture through lyric collage.”

Marilyn Chin:
"This is a spirited and restless imagination at work: the book is a giant collage of ancient fragments and lyrics. Sometimes Shin spews forth a catalogue of associative statements, sometimes she breaks into song. A very intriguing first book; I hope that Shin will keep her vitality and amaze us for years to come."

Jane Jeong Trenka:
"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."