What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, our editorial board members and invited poets reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the book and an excerpt from the essay. 
with thanks to Harryette Mullen
Here I am at the inconvenience
store of unspoken words. Rows of soft
silence. The produce
of our Korean families. Five thousand years

+

of the People in White. We are the girls
who went away, who left memory behind,
who ate pebbles and stopped talking.
We each need a librarian, an army of

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alphabets to keep us warm at night,
when our voices stiffen to copper and tin.
When our grandmothers dissolve into mist
and our grandfathers mold wives out of dirt.

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Here we are at the corner of the past and fate
no one discovered except American day
by American night. Work. Switching faces was easier
than trading one tongue for another.

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How do we pronounce our skin in English,
turn our silences inside out like a fox-fur stole.
The Korean fox with nine tails is a demon,
always a woman, her heart thick with dreams

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of human sacrifice, of the future of nature.
Korean girls who slept with the dictionary
so they would never be alone, so one day
they could give birth to bruises and poetry.
from the book THE WET HEX / Coffee House Press
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Color image of the cover of Sun Yung Shin's book, The Wet Hex
What Sparks Poetry:
Michael Kleber-Diggs on Sun Yung Shin's The Wet Hex

"Here’s what I didn’t even actually notice until I’d completed both laps through The Wet Hex—at a certain point I put my pencil down. I fell away from concern for craft and entered the poet’s world. For quite a while there, I forgot to think and felt my way through instead—guided by an expert, open."
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Color screen-shot of Sierra Leone Anderson talking to ABC news
Teen Poet from Los Angeles Ignites Change

15-year-old Sierra Leone Anderson wants readers of her poem, "For Uvalde," to understand the impact of gun violence. "If anyone reads this poem, whether they're youth, or they're an educator, whether they're not, I really want them to be afraid....I really want them to be scared of how kids are living now, of how we've lived for a very long time. And then I want them to actually do something about it."

via ABC7
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