JIhyun Yun
AND THE RIVER DRAGS YOU DOWN (PRH / Knopf BFYR, 2025)
SOME ARE ALWAYS HUNGRY (Univ of Nebraska Press, 2020)
Jihyun Yun is a Korean American writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. A Fulbright research fellow, her poetry collection Some Are Always Hungry was the recipient of the 2019 Prairie Schooner prize and was published by University of Nebraska Press in fall of 2020. Her work has been published or anthologized in Best New Poets, Narrative Magazine, Ninth Letter and elsewhere. She currently lives in Ann Arbor.
Books BY JIHYUN YUN
AND THE RIVER DRAGS YOU DOWN (PRH / Knopf BFYR, 2025)
The girls of the Han family are gifted with an unusual ability: when they bury bones in soil, they can regrow the bodies it was sourced from. When her elder sister Mirae drowns under mysterious circumstances, seventeen-year-old Soojin Han cannot resist the impulse to resurrect her via a saved milk-tooth. At first, the reunion is perfect. Her sister Mirae is as kind as ever and— together with their childhood friend Mark Moon, the first person in town to discover the Han Family secret— they cobble together a routine that mirrors a heavily idealized past.
To resurrected Mirae Han, however, things are less rosy. She can’t remember her own name. She is always ravenously hungry, and not allowed to be seen in town, she is forced to slink around in the dead of night like the malignant water ghost she fears she will become. When the carefully designed façade of normalcy begins to disintegrate, culminating in a series of unusual deaths in their idyllic all-American resort town, Soojin is forced to grapple with the reality that the sister she brought back is not the one she knew.
SOME ARE ALWAYS HUNGRY (Univ of Nebraska Press, 2020)
Some Are Always Hungry chronicles a family’s wartime survival, immigration, and heirloom trauma through the lens of food, or the lack thereof. Through the vehicle of recipe, butchery, and dinner table poems, the collection negotiates the myriad ways diasporic communities comfort and name themselves in other nations, as well as the ways cuisine is inextricably linked to occupation, transmission, and survival. Dwelling on the personal as much as the historical, Some Are Always Hungry traces the lineage of the speaker’s place in history and diaspora through mythmaking and cooking, which is to say, conjuring.
Praise:
“In this visceral yet compassionate inquiry into what makes us alive, Yun shows us how hope can be fashioned out of the desire to speak on and through atrocities. This book is one of those rare collections that stuns me back to my own life, somehow renewed, somehow better, kinder, and less alone.”—Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds
“Image by clear-eyed image, sound by tightly wrought sound, the poems in Some Are Always Hungry are a thundering revelation. At once a reckoning with immigration and historical trauma and rooted in the sensorial world, these poems are timeless and ongoing. Here is both the fever and the scar it leaves, the female body and the lineage of power, hunger, and desire, what cannot be forgotten and what keeps us alive despite it all; here is a poet staking her undeniable claim on the world.”—Ada Limón, author of The Carrying
“Jihyun Yun’s captivating poems hold a wise and magnetic energy at the center of each page, one rarely seen in a first book. This is a poet of grace and elemental blood-wisdom who will pull you to unexpected terrains where food is a vehicle not just to explore lineage and ancestors but to navigate the winding roads of the present and the future. . . . Some Are Always Hungry is a most magnificent and memorable debut from a deeply talented poet I’m certain we’ll be turning to again and again.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonder