Assistant Editor Emily Rose Cole: “Modernity is a rust factory,” 신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin declares in “Detonations,” a poem in which the technology of war brutally contrasts a natural landscape covered by “shawls of white grass and waste and fury.” The poem itself feels like a “letter to the bomb maker,” a letter in which jets are “giant mechanical hummingbirds” and the earth itself “spits its teeth at us.” Anger pulsates in this poem’s raw, red, stop-sign heart. It digs in and doesn’t let go.
To hear her read the poem, click below:
Detonations
If pain makes the body turn to cold flame / If scars are the photonegatives of suitable decisions / I wrote letter after letter to the bomb maker / Shawls of white grass and waste and fury / The earth spits its teeth at us / Giant mechanical hummingbirds fight over all the sugar / The Koreans scab the Japanese in the sweet-cane fields / Modernity is a rust factory / The hard soft binary / Exoskeletons make war even harder make our bodies insects and we are home / Lay down your lances / All your horses sleep next to your wildness you are the shadow / Ghosts cocktails moonlight fox fire to read by / Everywhere not libraries of the body / War the night show the day show the violins / The rubble the child burials the blood / Hearts the red stop signs / The graves / Your silver hair
신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin is the author of poetry collections Unbearable Splendor (2016); Rough, and Savage (2012); and Skirt Full of Black (2007), all from Coffee House Press. She is also the editor of two anthologies and the author of one children’s book. She lives in Minneapolis.
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