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• Money, Politics, and the Constitution: Beyond Citizens United Century Foundation Press (New York, NY), 2011
• Barter Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 2003
• Ignatz Four Way Books ((New York, NY)), 2010
• Blackacre Greywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 2016

1. Blackacre LCCN 2016931136 Type of material Book Personal name Youn, Monica, author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Blackacre / Monica Youn. Published/Produced Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, [2016] ©2016 Description 85 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9781555977504 (paperback) 1555977502 (paperback) CALL NUMBER PS3625.O76 A6 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Money, politics, and the Constitution : beyond Citizens United LCCN 2011010347 Type of material Book Main title Money, politics, and the Constitution : beyond Citizens United / Monica Youn, editor. Published/Created New York : Century Foundation Press, c2011. Description xiii, 279 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9780870785214 (pbk.) 0870785214 (pbk.) CALL NUMBER KF4920 .M663 2011 Copy 1 Request in Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242) 3. Ignatz LCCN 2009029463 Type of material Book Personal name Youn, Monica. Main title Ignatz / Monica Youn. Published/Created New York : Four Way Books ; Lebanon, NH : Distributed by University Press of New England, c2010. Description 69 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9781935536017 (pbk. : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2013 008587 CALL NUMBER PS3625.O76 I38 2010 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 4. Barter LCCN 2002111718 Type of material Book Personal name Youn, Monica. Main title Barter / Monica Youn. Published/Created Saint Paul, Minn. : Graywolf Press, c2003. Description 71 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 1555973817 Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bios/hol052/2002111718.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/hol031/2002111718.html CALL NUMBER PS3625.O76 B37 2003 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Poetry Foundation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/monica-youn

  Monica Youn
  Poet Details
  Eldridge Morrissey
  Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press, 2016); Barter (Graywolf Press, 2003); and Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the New York Times Magazine, and she has been awarded fellowships from the Library of Congress and Stanford University, among other awards. A former attorney, she now teaches poetry at Princeton University.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Youn

  Monica Youn
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Monica Youn
  Alma mater Princeton University,
  Yale Law School,
  Oxford University
  Genre Poetry
  Notable awards Witter Bynner Fellowship
  Monica Youngna Youn is an American poet and lawyer.

  Contents [hide]
  1 Life
  1.1 Literary career
  1.2 Legal career
  2 Awards
  3 Bibliography
  3.1 Poetry
  3.1.1 Collections
  3.1.2 List of poems
  3.1.3 Poems in anthologies
  3.2 Non-fiction
  3.2.1 Literary criticism
  3.2.2 Law
  4 References
  5 External links
  Life[edit]
  She was raised in Houston, Texas.

  She graduated from St. Agnes Academy (Texas), Princeton University, Yale Law School with a J.D., and Oxford University with a M. Phil, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

  Literary career[edit]
  She is the author of three books of poems -- Blackacre, Ignatz, and Barter.[1] Her second collection Ignatz was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry.[2] Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker,[3] Poetry Magazine,[4] The Paris Review,[5] among other journals. She has given readings at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA),[6] on NPR's All Things Considered[7] and was a keynote reader at the 2012 Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference.[8]

  She current teaches creative writing at Princeton University[9] and at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.[10] She previously taught at Bennington College, Columbia University, and at the Sarah Lawrence College MFA program.

  Legal career[edit]
  She was the inaugural Brennan Center Constitutional Fellow at New York University Law School.[11] She formerly directed the campaign finance reform project at the Brennan Center for Justice.[11] She is a member of the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States[12] and was co-lead counsel for Defendant-Intervenors in McComish v. Bennett in 2011.[13] She has appeared on PBS Newshour,[14]Hardball with Chris Matthews,[15] Bill Moyers Journal,[16] and Need to Know.[17] She is the editor of Money, Politics and the Constitution: Beyond Citizens United.[18] She has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee,[19] the House Judiciary Committee,[20] and the House Committee on Administration.[21]

  She was a pledged delegate for Obama in the 2008 presidential election.[22] She has written for Slate,[23] The Los Angeles Times,[24] and The Huffington Post.[25]

  Awards[edit]
  Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University
  Yaddo residency [26]
  MacDowell fellow [27]
  2008 Witter Bynner Fellowship
  Rockefeller Foundation / Bellagio—Villa Serbelloni,[28]
  National Book Award Finalist 2010[2]
  Bibliography[edit]
  This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
  Poetry[edit]
  Collections[edit]
  Youn, Monica (2003). Barter. Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press.
  Ignatz. Four Way Books. 2010. ISBN 193553601X.
  List of poems[edit]
  Title Year First published Reprinted/collected
  Brownacre 2016 Youn, Monica (May 23, 2016). "Brownacre". The New Yorker. 92 (15): 40–41.
  "Venice, Unaccompanied", Poetry Foundation
  "Titian’s Salome", AGNI 53, 2001
  "the wedding of ignatz", Tin House Review, Fall 2005
  "Epistle to Ignatz". The Brooklyn Rail. September 2004.
  "Ignatz Invoked; Winged Ignatz; Ignatz Domesticus". The Paris Review (181). Summer 2007.
  "Ignatz Oasis; Ersatz Ignatz; I-40 Ignatz". Guernica. April 2008.
  Poems in anthologies[edit]
  Victoria M. Chang, ed. (2004). "25th & Delores". Asian American poetry: the next generation. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-07174-4.
  Legitimate Dangers. Sarabande Books. 2006. ISBN 1932511296.
  Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. W. W. Norton & Company. 2008. ISBN 0393332381.
  Art and Artists: Poems. Everyman's Library. 2012. ISBN 978-0307959386.
  Non-fiction[edit]
  Literary criticism[edit]
  "OF POETRY AND POWER: REFLECTIONS ON THE INAUGURATION", Poetry Foundation
  Law[edit]
  Money, Politics, and the Constitution: Beyond Citizens United. Century Foundation Press. 2011. ISBN 978-0870785214.
  "The Chilling Effect and the Problem of Private Action". Vanderbilt Law Review. October 2013.
  "Proposition 8 and the Mormon Church: A Case Study in Donor Disclosure". George Washington Law Review. December 2013.
  "The Roberts Courts' Free Speech Double Standard". American Constitution Society. November 2011.
  "First Amendment Fault Lines and the Citizens United Decision". Harvard Law and Policy Review. February 2011.

• Princeton University - http://arts.princeton.edu/people/profiles/myyoun/

  Monica Youn

  LECTURER IN CREATIVE WRITING

  Monica Youn headshot
  ABOUT
  Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), Ignatz (Four Way Books 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Barter (Graywolf Press 2003). Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies, including The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. She has been awarded the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and the Witter Bynner Fellowship of the Library of Congress, as well as residencies at Civitella Ranieri, the Rockefeller Foundation — Bellagio, Yaddo and MacDowell. Youn received her A.B. from Princeton, where she completed the Certificate Program in Creative Writing, and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. After receiving her masters degree in English Literature from Oxford, she attended Yale Law School and practiced law for over a decade, testifying before Congress on multiple occasions, appearing as an expert commentator on PBS and MSNBC, and publishing political commentary in Slate and the New York Times, among other publications. She has previously taught poetry at Bennington College, Columbia University, and in the Warren Wilson and Sarah Lawrence M.F.A. programs.

  According to Linda Gregerson, “Monica Youn, quite simply, is one of the two or three most brilliant poets working in America today.” Stanley Fish has described the experience of reading Blackacre as follows: “words and objects are alike subjected to a probing intelligence that is at once philosophical and psychological.... The reader cannot relax for an instant, nor does she want to because the unfolding thought, wire tight and tactile as well as conceptual, is so compelling and demanding of a complete attention that is more than rewarded.” Kathleen Rooney, in the Chicago Tribune, praised Blackacre as "gorgeous and intellectually scintillating." Claudia Rankine has called Youn’s work “disconcerting in its spectatorship and breathtaking in its beauty," and Stephen Burt has said of Monica Youn, "No poet of her generation has made more demands on herself — and none has done more in her art."

• Tab - http://thetab.com/us/princeton/2016/02/24/meet-monica-youn-the-princeton-creative-writing-professor-who-was-beyonces-lawyer-2643

  Meet Monica Youn, the Princeton creative writing professor who was one of Beyoncé’s lawyers
  Share
  ANNA LEADER

  ‘Bruce Springsteen is a lovely man’

  Some Princeton professors are just crazy awesome, from literary villain and bad-ass Renaissance man Anthony Grafton, to the English department’s beloved Jeff Nunokawa.

  Creative writing professor Monica Youn, a Princeton alum, definitely falls into this elite category of legendary profs. She graduated one year behind Ted Cruz, in the class of 1993, with an undergraduate degree in the Woodrow Wilson school and a certificate in creative writing. Youn then went on to Oxford University to obtain an English degree, and finally found herself at Yale Law.

  After that, she juggled her love of poetry with her legal career. While she dedicated herself to representing A-list celebs like Beyoncé in copyright lawsuits and worked pro bono cases for non-profits seeking fairer voter ID laws, she also published critically acclaimed collections of poems. We’re impressed.

  Monica Youn photo 1

  Why did you decide to pursue a career in law after graduating?

  I had gone to Princeton originally to study law. I had grown up as the child of immigrants from Korea, and immigrants tend to have very defined notions of career paths. Also while growing up, I was one of those little girls who just liked to argue.

  You were on the debate team with Ted Cruz while at Princeton – what was that like?

  He was a very good debater, and I took over training the team from him. We were on perfectly civil terms – he was not nearly as confrontational then as he is now. I know a lot of people who have gone into politics – like Cory Booker, who is the senator of New Jersey, is a friend of mine, as are the mayor of Los Angeles and the governor of Rhode Island. He [Cruz] is not particularly out of the ordinary in that way. But he has definitely surprised me the most with the how he turned out – I’m surprised by the positions he’s taken. He was less extreme when I knew him.

  How did you choose entertainment law in particular?

  I was a writer at Princeton, very interested in the written text. I did a degree in English at Oxford, and I thought that with that background, copyright law made sense. When I got out of law school and was looking for a way to practice, the only way to do that was in entertainment. I mostly focused on music law, but occasionally I worked with TV and film.

  What’s the scene of celebrity law like? Was it glamorous?

  Undoubtedly, there were things that were very glamorous about it. Our firm always had an invitation to the Grammy Awards, and I got to watch the Black Sabbath reunion from the stage. You met a lot of celebrities. Some of them were extremely charming – Bruce Springsteen is a lovely man. Some of them were much less charming, and acted like children.

  It was in the early days of music and the internet – the record industry was changing very rapidly. There was a lot going on, and I had a great time doing it.

  Is it true that you represented Beyoncé when you were working as a lawyer? What was it like working with her?

  Yes, I was one of the lawyers who represented her for a contract dispute involving one of her modeling product gigs for L’Oreal. She and I bonded over being from Houston, Texas. She actually lives right around the corner from where I went to high school!

  Monica Youn photo 3

  Do you like Beyonce’s music? What do you think about her recent video and the general reactions to it?

  I have always loved her music. Of course – she’s great. I think that now she’s really coming into a new confidence about who she is as a star, a performer and a leader. It’s terrific to see her take ownership of her own image.

  When and why did you decide to dedicate yourself entirely to writing?

  When I got to law school, I was so miserable about not writing that I started looking for ways to continue. So I applied and won something called the Stegner fellowship in poetry at Stanford – Tracy K. Smith was actually a year ahead of me in the fellowship. It was a two year fellowship in creative writing, paid. At the time I had actually accepted a federal clerkship, working for a judge, and I had a moment of crisis – which am I going to do?

  I ended up turning down the clerkship, which caused the judge to have a fit. She said she would never hire anyone from my law school again. My parents refused to speak to me for oh, about six months. But I thought I had to do it. I can’t not write.

  Those two years helped me pull myself together as a poet, and come up with a lot of the poems that went into my first manuscript. I published that book, which did reasonably well, and then a second book – which was met with critical attention. I also stayed in touch with Paul Muldoon and a couple others in the Creative Writing department at Princeton, and they asked me to come read at a festival they were hosting. They then offered me an opening for a substitute teacher because another professor was going out on maternity leave. I came – it all worked out – and I’ve been here ever since.

  Monica Youn photo 2

  Are there any places where the skills needed for poetry and law overlap in your mind?

  In both law and poetry, there is a very intensive attention to language. I was a trial lawyer, and that involves a lot of presentation of material in striking and persuasive ways. You’re thinking a lot about word choice and structure.

  Poetry can take more risks, each poem creates its own form as it goes along, whether that form chooses to partake in the tradition of established forms or if it does something completely different. You have a certain freedom – you come to the page and you say, I can do whatever I want to with this page.

• Rhodes Project - http://rhodesproject.com/monica-youn-profile/

  Profile with Monica Youn

  Monica Youn (Texas & University College 1993) is a poet and will start teaching poetry at Princeton University and at Bennington College in the fall. Her works have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she has published two books of poetry, Barter (2003) and Ignatz (2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Previously she was the Brennan Center Constitutional Fellow at NYU School of Law, where she focused on election law and First Amendment issues. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, an M. Phil from Oxford University in English Literature, and a B.A. from Princeton University.

  Rhodes Project: Where do you call home?

  Monica Youn: New York City is definitely home for me. It’s not where I grew up but it’s the only place that has ever felt like home.

  Rhodes Project: What was the last book that you couldn’t put down?

  Monica Youn: Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies. I was so attached to the book that I was rationing it out. Towards the end I’d only allow myself to read five pages each night to make the experience last longer. At the time I was staying at an artist residency in Umbria, in a fifteenth century castle with actual murder holes and arrow slits and a pile of spears in the corner. Reading the book in that environment was perfect.

  Rhodes Project: You occupy two different professions that aren’t commonly associated with each other, a writer and a lawyer. Can you speak to how your work as a poet informs the way you approach the practice of the law?

  Monica Youn: Just last week I gave notice at my law job, and I will start teaching poetry in the fall at Princeton and at Bennington College. My work as a poet informs my practice as a lawyer in that I think it makes transparent for me when people are employing rhetorical or verbal devices to make a particular point. I notice when a first line of a judicial opinion or of a legal brief is in regular rhythmic meter, which sometimes they are, and also when people take advantage in speeches of such devices as alliteration, anaphora etc.

  As a poet I tend to be fascinated by the way in which language is used in the law. You have these nuggets of language, like in the States you have “due process of law” or “cruel and unusual punishment.” These nuggets have accumulated meaning throughout history so that you can’t use them without implying that heritage. It’s somewhat similar to the way that certain metaphors are used in poetry. For example, I can’t use the word “apple” in a poem without invoking all of the symbolic freight of that image throughout literary history.

  Rhodes Project: How does your work as a lawyer inform your poetry?

  Monica Youn: I have never written directly about legal topics in my poetry – I feel like I have another form of writing that more than adequately takes care of that – but I am currently working on a new book of poems that I have decided to call Blackacre. I’m hoping to make this book my poetic farewell to the law. Blackacre is a legal concept that was coined by Sir Edward Coke in the 16th century. Just as you use “John Doe” to refer to an imaginary plaintiff, Blackacre refers to a hypothetical piece of property. I am using the term in a poetical sense to talk about questions of legacy, landscape and particularly the term “devise”. Creatively a devise is a work of the imagination, but in law a devise is a piece of property passed down by will.

  Rhodes Project: You are an expert on campaign finance and election law issues, often discussing the possibly corrupting effect that big money can have on democracy. How do you think those priorities of social justice will remain a part of your work as a poet?

  Monica Youn: It is something that I have not yet figured out. In some ways, poetry is a retreat from the world. Auden famously said that “poetry makes nothing happen.” I have always thought that I would be fooling myself if I believed that any poem that I wrote would make a concrete difference to social or economic justice. So definitely the work I do as a poet will be less directly involved in these issues, but I am hoping that given my legal training, I will be able still to get some sort of leverage on socially important issues, whether through teaching or working for a nonprofit. I have also done a certain amount of political commentating in my work as a lawyer and I am hoping that I will be able to keep that up even in my new role as a poet.

  Rhodes Project: Is there anything that consistently frustrates you?

  Monica Youn: Politics definitely frustrates me. It is so interesting to see people repeat arguments that they know are fictitious, on both sides of the political spectrum. You wonder what goes through their minds. They know that what they are saying is false, and they continue to repeat it for their own advantage. It must be an interesting thought process that gets a person to that point.

  There isn’t really dialogue in politics any more, only a series of monologues. One of the things that I think the Supreme Court did here in the United States is to ensure that whoever has the most money is entitled to buy the stage.

  There have been a series of very wrongheaded decisions made in this area in American jurisprudence over decades. We have always struggled with money and campaign speech and how the First Amendment and democracy should best be balanced. The problem is how we conceive of elections. Is speech in an election normal discourse in the marketplace? Or is an election something else? Are there different interests that should enter into what we think of political discourse?

  Rhodes Project: Does money speak louder than justice in that context?

  Monica Youn: It is hard to think of the two on the same field or even speaking the same language. You see that more and more with cable news these days; what becomes visible or remains invisible is a function of money, as most things are. I’m not someone that is anti-money or anti-capitalist but I do think some more nuanced thinking is required when it comes to money, speech and democracy.

  Rhodes Project: If you had unlimited resources to address one issue, local or global, what would it be and why?

  Monica Youn: I think it would have to be climate change. It’s not something I know much about, but in terms of sheer impact - whether economic or political - it is one thing that you can point to that is worsening exponentially.

  Rhodes Project: What is a memorable learning moment you’ve had recently?

  Monica Youn: I am preparing to teach a class on Ezra Pound and I am trying to figure out what it is exactly that Pound did and how to encapsulate that for undergraduate students. I read something that a critic has written, which I think is absolutely true and not many people have said before, is that Pound made the unit of poetry the individual line instead of the individual stanza.

  Rhodes Project: What is something that you are looking forward to?

  Monica Youn: I am very much looking forward to teaching. I have always pushed poetry to the side. I have done it on my allotted vacation times and nights and weekends. It will be interesting to see what happens now I am making it primary. When people have asked me what I do, I have always said, “I am a lawyer, comma, and also a poet.” It will be interesting now that I can really just say that “I am a poet.”

  Back to Scholar Profiles T-Z

Newspoet: Monica Youn Writes The Day In Verse
All Things Considered. 2012. From Literature Resource Center.
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Each month, we invite a poet to spend the day with us and compose a poem reflecting the day's news. Well, today, we're joined by Monica Youn. Her second collection of poems, "Ignatz," was a finalist for a National Book Award in 2010. In addition to her life as a poet, Monica Youn is a lawyer specializing in election law. Monica, welcome to the program.

Thank you so much for having me.

How tricky adventure was this for you, being a poet and at the same time digesting the news and trying to meld that into one thing?

Well, this is very hard because in my life as a lawyer and as an advocate, I do election law, so I'm very much tied into the news and politics and all of that. And so I'm very used to dealing with that with the lawyer half of my brain. And so trying to handle a lot of that same material using the poet side of my brain was kind of like trying to draw a picture with your left hand when you're used to being right-handed. It just felt strange and uncomfortable but also sort of interesting.

And were you able to rise above that...

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

...uncomfortable feeling and then get the creative juices flowing?

I certainly hope so. I mean, I just wrote this poem. It's fresh off the presses, and I'll take a look at it...

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

...in a few weeks and tell you what I actually think of it.

Now, I'm really curious to hear what you've come up with. Can you read it for us?

Sure.

Great.

It's called "24."

(Reading) Fear is the coin dropping into its slot; $2 fall to the liquor shop floor. The day is a net of 24 knots. A modestly veiled woman poses no threat, but the veil truly masks a thief's face and hair. Fear is the coin dropping into its slot. Three hundred Priuses that someone forgot voluptuously rust in the Miami air. The day is a net of 24 knots. The primary insight of Keynesian thought: The way out of debt is for us to spend more. Fear is the coin dropping into its slot.

(Reading) A lawsuit, foreclosure, inescapable debt is the price of a new mother's prenatal care. The day is a net of 24 knots. A blind man trapped in a ring of perpetual light slips the noose, vanishes into the glare. Fear is the coin dropping into its slot. The day is a net of 24 knots.

The poem "24" from Monica Youn. And I see you've incorporated the thoughts from a number of the stories in the program today. Tell me about this repeating line: The day is a net of 24 knots.

That was initially inspired by this blind activist who has escaped in China because apparently he had 24 guards stationed around his house at all times who were, you know, creating this sort of net. But I was also thinking of it in terms of the constraints of the 24-hour news cycle and that things just keep happening. And in terms of my own, I guess, self-pitying constraints in trying to write this poem on the schedule and...

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

...and thinking about trying to be a poet on the 24-hour news cycle.

Do you think - when you think about the poem now, is it something that you might go back to, tinker with, play around a little bit?

Oh, yeah. I think I definitely might. I mean, I might sub in some things. I was relying kind of too heavily on the online rhyming dictionary while...

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

...writing this on the schedule.

Oh, true confession here from our NewsPoet.

So, yeah, I'm sure I would tweak it quite a bit.

When you usually write a poem, what's your process like?

Usually, when I write a poem, I think of it like super saturating a solution, like you just keep adding things into the beaker until something crystallizes. And it happens all at once, but the whole process of adding things into the beaker usually, for me, takes months, if not years. So I think this was as fast as I've ever tried to write a poem.

Well, we thank you for taking it on. Monica Youn, who's our NewsPoet for the month of April, thanks so much.

Thank you.

Blackacre: Poems
Publishers Weekly.
263.33 (Aug. 15, 2016): p47.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Blackacre: Poems
Monica Youn. Graywolf, $16 trade paper (88p) ISBN 978­1­55597­750­4
This third collection from Youn (Ignatz) finds her tightly yet playfully interrogating inheritance and legacy, real and
fictional landscapes, and the particular bodily experience of a woman hoping to conceive. The title refers to a legal
term denoting a type of fictional entity, a hypothetical real estate; Youn's legal background (she was a practicing lawyer
for years) emerges in her attention to detail and ability to parse concepts. Formally and syntactically diverse, the poems
often portray a mature, professional woman wrestling with the philosophy and psychology of all that that life entails.
Word play abounds (a statement// of intent, of well­meant/ amends; an acquiescent an­/ athema in its seam­/ less
unseen net"), as do references to working life and an intellectualized distancing when dealing with corporeality (one
day they showed me a dark moon ringed/ with a bright nimbus on a swirling gray screen/ they called it my last chance
for never­ending life/ but the next day it was gone7). Throughout, Youn's lawyerly analyses­­of life, of herself, her
feelings, and of language­­cut through the poetic to a place that lies triangulated between poetry, lyric memoir, and
textual analysis. It is in that latter element that Youn deconstructs the nature of possession and boundedness; in the act
of self­claiming, Youn wonders, did she make herself into a resource that was bounded, and, therefore, exhaustible?"
(Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Blackacre: Poems." Publishers Weekly, 15 Aug. 2016, p. 47. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461444511&it=r&asid=746de65f1d5df9191aad12cefb1d989d.
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Youn, Monica. Blackacre
C. Diane Scharper
Library Journal.
141.13 (Aug. 1, 2016): p99.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
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Full Text:
Youn, Monica. Blackacre. Graywolf. Sept. 2016. 96p. ISBN 9781555977504. pap. $16. POETRY
Just as John Milton reflected on his blindness in his sonnet, "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent," Youn reflects
on her barrenness in her latest book of poetry. The author of two previous collections, Barter and Ignatz, a finalist for
the National Book Award, Youn is a lawyer­­turned­­poet/ writing professor. This book takes an almost childlike
delight in wordplay as it blends autobiography with images from nature as well as allusions to Tarot cards, biblical
passages, and works by Milton, e.e. cummings, Virginia Woolf, and others. The title comes from the law school
concept of "blackacre," a legal fiction meaning a hypothetical estate just as John Doe is a hypothetical name. Youn
bases many of the poems on this concept calling them "Whiteacre," "Greenacre," "Brownacre," etc. The title poem­­
heavy with allusions to Milton's sonnet­­is a lengthy prose poem about her inability to bear a child and her subsequent
efforts to conceive using in vitro fertilization. VERDICT Ultimately, this collection contains a somewhat uneasy
though generally pleasing mix of references and styles ranging from minimalist, Zenlike offerings to free verse to fullthroated
prose poems. Sophisticated readers should investigate.­­C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD
Scharper, C. Diane
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Scharper, C. Diane. "Youn, Monica. Blackacre." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 99. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459805054&it=r&asid=3944266103577cc4eca6edd0130f64ca.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
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Ignatz
Publishers Weekly.
257.12 (Mar. 22, 2010): p54.
COPYRIGHT 2010 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Ignatz
Monica Youn. Four Way (UPNE, dist.), $15.95 (82p) ISBN 978­1­935536­01­7
George Herriman drew the comic strip Krazy Kat, which was published across America, between 1913 and 1944. It
followed the antics of the titular cat, who is madly in love with Ignatz Mouse, who would rather attack Krazy with a
brick than return the feeling. The strip serves as the inspiration and jumping off point for this second book by Youn
(Barter), though intimate familiarity with the strip is hardly necessary to enjoy these poems. Unrequited desire is the
theme. "Oh Ignatz won't you play me/like a filigree flute?" asks one of four poems titled "Untitled (Krazy's Song)."
Ignatz becomes an open­ended figure for the inaccessible beloved, a kind of muse that's always out of reach. In wiry
verse, prose poems, sharp, jagged stanzas, and even lines that mimic the movement of a tetherball, Youn traces the
many incarnations of desire: "the way water is always rushing between a ferry//and its dock in that ever­present gap.'"
In the stunning "X as a Function of the Distance from Ignatz," desire is measured in feet: "(he is forty feet/away) the
stiff wind/palpably stripping//his scent from her hair." Not only has Youn created a thrilling book of poems but also
opened new avenues for ekphrastic poetry. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Ignatz." Publishers Weekly, 22 Mar. 2010, p. 54. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA222678099&it=r&asid=ee7d22a3f164149dcf970a337ef82c30.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486958554691 4/5
Youn, Monica. Barter
Ellen Kaufman
Library Journal.
128.10 (June 1, 2003): p127.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Graywolf. 2003. c.64p. LC 2002111718. ISBN 1­55597­381­7. pap. $14. POETRY
Youn's first collection is frustratingly obscure in places, but her description dazzles. "Drawing for Absolute Beginners"
a difficult piece, surveys eight sections of the "ideal male body" as outlined by an old­fashioned drawing text: "Eyes
glass boxes/filling up with light. Later, drained to a blue­gray, the color of/good government." A metaphor about
Venice is as intriguing but less puzzling: "I learned ... to walk/through the alien city­­a beekeeper's habit­­/with fierce
light/clinging to my head and hands." Youn generates a sexual charge as she moves through alternate worlds of
pornography and art, annotating her references with author's notes, two indispensable pages that explain, among other
things, that the book's epitaph comes "from the Norse myth of the ribbon Glepnir, which is made of nonexistent
things." Youn's subjects also include Korea, the subjugation of women, and the torture of children, but she writes most
convincingly about the middle regions of the United States, including her native Texas: "We know no other shapes/than
those that contain us:/we have built our zoneless city,/ a hub of freeways, a dark etoile." A sophisticated debut;
recommended for academic collections.­­Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Kaufman, Ellen
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Kaufman, Ellen. "Youn, Monica. Barter." Library Journal, 1 June 2003, p. 127. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA103125632&it=r&asid=f0ffeb973510fd9f8fda7e340d2ae819.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
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Barter. (April First Books)
Publishers Weekly.
250.16 (Apr. 21, 2003): p58.
COPYRIGHT 2003 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Monica Youn. Graywolf, $14 paper (64p) ISBN 1­55597­381­7
"Technically edible/like the nasturtiums," Youn's poems are a decadent decade's blowback, "[s]omething
authoritative,/asymmetrical, perhaps/a bit outre." A Houston­raised former Stegner fellow, Youn is a lawyer in New
York, and delivers these 42 poems. "ex machina in silver lame."
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Barter. (April First Books)." Publishers Weekly, 21 Apr. 2003, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA100877703&it=r&asid=c360b9f6d93d2c47b5a680a8f33a5e09.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A100877703

"Newspoet: Monica Youn Writes The Day In Verse." All Things Considered, 27 Apr. 2012. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA288203885&it=r&asid=ffdd4b3e09b9e86c9eeae34936e3f5ca. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. "Blackacre: Poems." Publishers Weekly, 15 Aug. 2016, p. 47. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461444511&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. Scharper, C. Diane. "Youn, Monica. Blackacre." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 99. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459805054&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. "Ignatz." Publishers Weekly, 22 Mar. 2010, p. 54. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA222678099&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. Kaufman, Ellen. "Youn, Monica. Barter." Library Journal, 1 June 2003, p. 127. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA103125632&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. "Barter. (April First Books)." Publishers Weekly, 21 Apr. 2003, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA100877703&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.

• Chicago Tribune
  http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-blackacre-monica-youn-20160901-story.html
  Word count: 783

  Former lawyer Monica Youn makes her case in new poetry collection 'Blackacre'
  'Blackacre'
  Graywolf Press / Handout
  Kathleen Rooney
  Chicago Tribune
  Most nonlawyers are familiar with the custom of using the names "John Doe" or "Jane Doe" to signify an anonymous party, usually the plaintiff, in a legal action. Fewer people outside the legal profession are aware of the related use of the term "Blackacre" as a placeholder in cases and discussions pertaining to the rights of various parties to a piece of land.

  Monica Youn uses the latter to great effect as the title of her third poetry collection, "Blackacre." In this precise, taut, and philosophical hybrid, she examines highly conceptual realms through imagery and syntax that seem magical in their ability to make the abstract concrete in much the same way that these fictitious people and properties do in legal matters.

  RELATED: TRENDING LIFE & STYLE NEWS THIS HOUR

  Other hypothetical estates that might crop up in such cases include Whiteacre, Greenacre, Brownacre, Redacre and Blueacre, and throughout the brilliant central and final sequences of this stunning collection, Youn employs these words, with their obvious poetic as well as legal implications, to explore, among other things, the answer to the question, "But what if a given surface is coaxed into fruitfulness wrongfully?"

  Youn is the author of two previous collections, "Barter" and "Ignatz," which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is also a former lawyer who currently teaches writing at Princeton University and in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Here, she draws on her background in law to make leaps into the fields of family, fertility, art, shame, fear and hope.

  The book opens with a poem called "Palinode," a piece in which the poet retracts a view or sentiment expressed in a previous poem. It reads in its entirety,

  I was wrong

  please I was

  wrong please I

  wanted nothing please

  I don't want.

  And Youn does look hard at desire: how it arises, how it is satisfied, and how it recurs.

  The desire — and struggle — to have a child, especially, weave in and out of the collection's four sections. In fact, the second section begins with a prose poem called "Desideratum," meaning something that is needed or wanted. Youn fills the subsequent pieces with nature motifs that speak not only to botanical life, but also to the speaker's urge to reproduce herself: "a seed falls // from a bird's / unappeasable body. // A little twirl of air / guides them down the trunk // as if down a glass staircase // (not to a room) / to a landing, // a crevice, / (not a cradle)."

  Each poem feels urgent thanks to the tension created by language that is austere yet unsparing, and rhetoric that is restrained yet deeply emotional, as when she writes in "Lamentation of the Hanged Man": "I am always turning // in the same / idiot arcs, // always facing / the horizon's white- // lipped sneer." Her intelligence feels extensive and inviting, particularly thanks to the sources from which she draws her epigraphs, ranging from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's "A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia" to a snopes.com report on Twinkies.

  In a thoughtful piece about the sequence for the Poetry Foundation, Youn writes, "I think of each '____acre' as a landscape, a legacy — the allotment each of us is given to work with, whether that allotment is a place, a span of time, a work of art, a body, a destiny. … What are the limits of the imagination's ability to transform what is given?"

  Her imagination proves itself immensely transformative, recounting her considerations and reconsiderations, as when she writes, unexpectedly but aptly comparing her speaker's experiences of barrenness to John Milton's experiences of blindness, "My mistake was similar. I came to consider my body — its tug-of-war of tautnesses and slacknesses — to be entirely my own, an appliance for generating various textures and temperatures of friction."

  Aside from Wallace Stevens, who graduated from New York Law School in 1903 and went on to work as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, and a handful of other examples, such as Reginald Dwayne Betts, there's not a strong association between poets and the law. Youn's Blackacre stands as a gorgeous and intellectually scintillating addition to this esoteric and necessary tradition.

  Kathleen Rooney is the co-editor of "ReneMagritte: Selected Writings," which has just been released by University of Minnesota Press.

  Blackacre

  By Monica Youn, Graywolf Press

• NPR
  http://www.npr.org/2016/10/20/498736779/blackacre-a-collection-of-poems-about-searching-and-being-buffeted
  Word count: 447

  'Blackacre': A Collection Of Poems About 'Searching And Being Buffeted'

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  October 20, 20164:19 PM ET
  Heard on All Things Considered
  TESS TAYLOR
  Tess Taylor reviews the poetry collection Blackacre by Monica Youn.

  ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

  Monica Youn's new collection of poems "Blackacre" takes its title from a 17th-century legal term. Our reviewer Tess Taylor says Youn turns the legalese into poetry.

  TESS TAYLOR, BYLINE: As well as being one of the most consistently innovative poets working today, Monica Youn is a Yale-trained lawyer. And so as all lawyers do, she learned in property law that blackacre is a centuries-old legal term that stands in for a fictitious estate.

  In legal practice, positing a blackacre has been used to explore laws about easements or environmental rights or whether or not farmer A will eventually owe farmer B potatoes. This might be a bit far afield from poetry, but in this case, the estate Youn is looking to claim is the estate of the body, specifically the body that wants to conceive a child.

  In this book, both the body of the speaker and of the longed-for child are held up as fictions, sites that can be thought about and named but may or may not be wholly claimable at all. This means that Youn is essentially writing a study of longing for something at once internal and out of control, something highly envisioned that may never come to pass.

  What does it mean to imagine claiming something as strange as a baby or, for that matter, a self? What, in the end, does it mean to hope? These are open questions, and Youn mines them with precise skill. As she circles ideas of barrenness and fertility, Youn unsettles the way we imagine our possessions, interiors or borders at all. What is the work of desire? What slips away even as we try to name it? Glancing off mythic landscapes, slipping by Homer and Milton, Youn's poems also thread through, as she puts it, radiant squares of sensation, the body a dichotomy of flesh and blood. At what point does this lacework shift over from intricacy to impossibility, she asks?

  Youn's poems, luminous fictions, also capture the sheer force of imagining itself, the slippery elusive loops of desire. Youn writes, it is almost unseemly - this exalting - the maypole the seed has made of its body.

  SIEGEL: That's Tess Taylor reviewing "Blackacre." It's the newest collection of poems by Monica Youn. Tess Taylor's most recent book is "Work And Days."

• Poetry Foundation
  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/06/on-blackacre/
  Word count: 1059

  On ‘Blackacre’
  BY MONICA YOUN
  Youn_Monicac-Eldridge-Morrissey
  [Note: Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Monica Youn’s “Blackacre” appears in the June 2015 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.]
  “Blackacre” is a legal fiction, an imaginary landscape. Just as we use “John Doe” for a hypothetical person, lawyers use “Blackacre” as a placeholder term for a hypothetical plot of land. Every law student in the Anglo-American system encounters the term in the core course on property law, and in trusts and estates law. So a typical hypothetical on a law school exam might start: “John Doe, possessor of a fee simple in Blackacre, wishes to transfer his interest to Jane Roe, in exchange for her property Whiteacre….” The sequence of fictional properties continues with Greenacre, Brownacre, Redacre, and Blueacre. First coined by Sir Edward Coke in 1628, Blackacre—with its echoes of Bleak House, of black-letter law, of blight taken to gothic extremes—is an inside joke among lawyers, a password marking one’s initiation into a centuries-old tradition of legal indoctrination.
  “Blackacre” is the title sequence of my forthcoming book, which also contains poems titled Whiteacre, Greenacre, etc. I think of each “____acre” as a landscape, a legacy—the allotment each of us is given to work with, whether that allotment is a place, a span of time, a work of art, a body, a destiny. We never start with a blank slate—each acre has been previously tenanted, enriched and depleted, built up and demolished. What are the limits of the imagination’s ability to transform what is given? On any particular ____acre can we plant a garden? found a city? unearth a treasure? build a home?
  •
  When I was trying to write the poem that became “Blackacre,” I was trying to write something painfully private, painfully personal—about my “barrenness,” my desire to have a child who would be genetically “mine,” my increasingly irrational pursuit of that desire, its long-drawn-out failure, the fallout of recriminations and regrets, and my eventual decision to have a child by other means. I’ve never been comfortable with autobiographical material, and for years I circled the topic, trying innumerable false starts, wanting to approach the issue straightforwardly but failing at every attempt.
  Any kind of direct treatment seemed inadequate, untrue. My “experience” of infertility was a tiny kernel rattling around in a confusion of cartilaginous walls: vestiges of my Catholic upbringing, my Korean-American background, my legal training, my socialization into normative codes of class and gender and sexuality, the stories and lessons and phrases that chorus in my brain—all the semi-dismantled interpenetrating structures through which I filter and process sensations, emotions, thoughts. The resonating echoes from these half-ruined structures were as much the subject of the poem as any originating “experience.”
  My attention kept shifting away from the blank page and toward a space already furrowed with black text, the near-rectangle of Milton’s great sonnet “On His Blindness.” It was a field already trenched and planted and harvested that I would try to force into yielding another crop, using whatever technologies of fertilization, gleaning, grafting that I could devise. A perverse endeavor, maybe, but one that felt right to me.
  •
  Sonnet 19 is a poem that I’ve always obsessed over, a poem that I recite under my breath while waiting for subways and elevators, a poem in which I’m constantly finding new depths and patterns. Mulling over the question of my infertility, the words “spent,” “useless,” “denied,” “chide,” “need,” “wait” kept thudding in my mind. Using Milton’s poem as the frame for my own poem “on my barrenness” somehow became the only workable solution.
  It’s not that blindness and barrenness are in any way commensurate, not by orders of magnitude both quantitative and qualitative. But there’s a structural similarity in the way Milton tries to rationalize his blindness and the way we talk about infertility. In Milton’s poem, serving God is a universal good, and he mourns his inability to make an active contribution to that good. But Patience cuts short his flow of regrets, telling him that the good does not depend on his direct involvement; that he participates in the good even if he cannot claim a personal stake in it. We never hear how, or whether, Milton replies to these assurances; Patience gets the last word, both literally (“wait”) and rhetorically.
  Similarly, we often treat parenthood as a universal good (although one that many opt not to pursue). Of course, there are many ways to participate in that good without a personal (i.e., genetic) stake in it—adoption, the use of egg and sperm donors, etc. But that assurance—that nongenetic parenting is the perfect equivalent of genetic parenting—can’t explain our culture’s no-holds-barred pursuit of genetic parenthood: IUI, IVF, egg-freezing, surrogacy, and other assisted reproductive technologies, the edge of desperation that shows itself in conversations about the biological clock. Some of the most progressive and enlightened couples of my acquaintance have spent money and time they could barely afford on successive rounds of IUI and IVF and hormone therapies and homeopathic remedies and acupuncture—a dead-end street I travelled down for years.
  What motivated me to engage in serial renunciations, purifications, penetrations, to submit to measures that were painful and humiliating and carcinogenic and expensive? How can I make sense of my own desperation? Was it egotism—the temptation to trace one’s own features and traits in a younger (and more adorable) self? Heteronormativity taken to extremes? Family pressure? Fear of death? Self-abnegation? Some primordial biological imperative buried deep within the lizard brain?
  •
  I’m a mother now. I love my son, I can’t imagine loving him more. When I was writing “Blackacre,” I was determined to finish it before my son was born. Surveying Blackacre from this vantage point—from across the border of parenthood—the topography and features of the landscape are resonantly familiar to me. But I can be glad that I don’t live there anymore.
  Tags: John Milton, Monica Youn, Poetry guest blogger
  Posted in From Poetry Magazine on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015 by Monica Youn.

• Boston Review
  http://bostonreview.net/admussen-youn-ignatz
  Word count: 291

  Microreview: Monica Youn, Ignatz
  NICK ADMUSSEN
  Jan 1, 2011
  Topics: POETRY CRITICISM
  Share:
  by Monica Youn,
  Four Way Books, $15.95 (paper)

  Monica Youn’s second collection is tied together by the world of Krazy Kat, a comic strip that spanned both World Wars as it serialized the unrequited love of Krazy Kat for Ignatz, an enraged mouse who ended most strips by chucking a brick at the forlorn Kat. The comic’s endless repetition of this formula—ardor, disgust, brick—gives Youn the license and confidence to enter the endlessly repeating world of the love poem, a license she uses to mix generic expressions of desire—“She thought to brush her hand against his thigh. / She thought to trace the seam of his jeans with her thumbnail”—with those inspired by the comic strip’s surreal southwestern landscapes. The latter find Youn at her best, as do her brief, elegant sketches of the motions and countermotions of the book’s sweet-cruel affection: “O my dear devoir / O my dour devour.” The sense of lightness and play is just a shell in Ignatz, and Youn drills through it until the characters achieve the gravity of real life and the dimensionality of real bodies. There are no glib, one-off jokes in this collection: “running from Ignatz and the night / like a drumskin and her heart like someone // locked in the trunk of a car and if there were / only time god she would spit it out.” Even so, there is a charge of sheer pleasure—that of poetry, not comedy—when the narrative hits its apex, and our constant, cyclical pursuit hangs exposed, crystallized: “Her head / reared back // in an animal / posture—// Ignatz / as always // obliged.”

• Lantern Review blog
  http://www.lanternreview.com/blog/2010/04/29/review-monica-youns-ignatz/
  Word count: 742

  April 29, 2010
  Review: Monica Youn’s IGNATZ

  Monica Youn's IGNATZ
  Ignatz by Monica Youn | Four Way Books 2010 | $15.95

  Monica Youn’s second book of poems, Ignatz (the prize for our 2010 National Poetry Month Prompt Contest), is based on Ignatz Mouse from George Herriman’s comic strip Krazy Kat. I read the collection without prior knowledge of the comic strip, other then the basic synopsis that the cat loves the mouse, the mouse hates the cat, and the cat mistakes the mouse’s hate for love. Thus, the collection is presented as a series of unrequited love poems. The pieces often present an ambiguous and painful love, where the object of the love is never identified and never responds.

  Youn’s language is lyrical and majestic, with images that evoke the highest ideals of love and quickly make the reader forget that the poems are rooted in comic strip characters. She does not hesitate to use romantic or archaic language, and modern references such as Amtrak and CEO come as a surprise when they appear. In “I-40 Ignatz”, the speaker describes the interstate with tanker trucks, stoplights, gas stations, and yet still embeds them in loftier images such as, “A cop car drowses / in the scrub / cottonwoods. Utmost.” What stands out the most throughout the collection is her use of distinctive imagery.

  Images of the landscape, the body, and the strange ways in which they intersect recur throughout the collection. In “Landscape with Ignatz”, Youn describes a canyon and the sky as bodies, and the place where the canyon and the sky touch as the meeting of two bodies. Each of the six lines is vivid and unusual, including the opening one: “The rawhide thighs of the canyon straddling the knobbled blue spine of the sky.” Another piece, “Ignatz Oasis”, opens with: “When you have left me / the sky drains of color / like the skin / of a tightening fist.” These moments are not conventionally beautiful, but instead reflect the tension lying immediately under the surface. The poems are like postcards, capturing simple messages across the changing landscape without revealing the depth of emotion behind them.

  Youn demonstrates great versatility in her writing, playing with different styles and formats. Most of the poems are written in the first person, invoking or addressing an unknown “you” (ostensibly, the object of the unrequited love). The titles of the poems often reveal their intent; for example, the opening poem is entitled “Ignatz Invoked”. Other pieces include “Ignatz Aubade”, “Letter to Ignatz”, “A Theory of Ignatz”, and “Ignatz: Pop Quiz”. She also experiments with line arrangements, from prose poems to a collection of fifteens words presented in three columns of five words each (“Ignatz Incarcerated”).

  In general, the speaker appears to present a certain sense of simultaneous self-awareness and obliviousness. The love expressed is nuanced and complex but with no sense of reciprocity. “Ersatz Ignatz” almost suggests the object of the affection becomes irrelevant to the performance of the affection itself. The poem ends with, “He’ll enter from the west, backlit in orange isinglass, pyrite / pendants glinting from the fringes of his voice.”

  The book is divided into four sections, each opening with a poem called, “Untitled (Krazy’s Song)” and ending with a poem called, “The Death of Ignatz”. These poems frame the sections, with each “Untitled (Krazy’s Song)” expressing a tangible but unattainable love and each “The Death of Ignatz” evoking a poignant sense of loss. The two modes provide a clear juxtaposition. The four poems entitled “Untitled (Krazy Song)” have an intentional saccharine quality while the four poems entitled “Death of Ignatz” are distilled precision, as the very last piece shows:

  The architect leapt

  from the bright
  bell tower

  and the sea
  slunk back

  to her cage

  Throughout the collection, the pieces feel like they are building toward a greater realization that never arrives, reflecting the same sense of cyclicity and stagnation that is one of the central themes. Yet Youn manages to create a sense of complicity — the reader’s frustrations parallel that of the speaker — leading to a sense of pity for the speaker’s desperation. This sense of the dramatic, like the extreme caricatures portrayed in comic strips, heightens the carefully crafted sense of excess and futility that Youn presents in Ignatz.

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