Reviews

Some Are Always Hungry by Jihyun Yun

lullylove's review

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5.0

“Let me live inside this girlhood (…); I walk into the sea and it chooses not to drown me”
— the acknowledgments at the end had me in tears :))

rachelselene's review

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3.0

so powerful and evocative

sibillq's review

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4.0

i'm still not sure how to rate poetry but this made me tear up

coriandercilantro's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective slow-paced

4.25


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river24's review

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emotional reflective fast-paced

4.25

4.25/5

Now, men with bayonets.
Tomorrow, dogs. In no version
are they not hunting us.

missdaisy17's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

3.75

basilkumquat's review

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5.0

So beautiful and multidimensional! Some Are Always Hungry speaks to hunger from intergenerational trauma and erasure, immigration from South Korea to the US, feminity and those that seek to ravage it, and food itself. What do we do when we are desperate with hunger? And what does that hunger do to our children and theirs?

brice_mo's review

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5.0

That final stanza.

trin_bookshelf's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.0

veecaswell's review

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4.0

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Some Are Always Hungry chronicles a family’s wartime survival, immigration, and heirloom trauma through the lens of food, or the lack thereof.


This collection is certainly unforgettable, in how it uses language and metaphor to deliver imagery that is second to none. 'The Leaving Season' is a great example of how the author uses food and imagery as a way of portraying human emotion as she uses the example of a pig, and though somewhat uncomfortable I was, the use of the imagery was incredible and made you able to understand what the writer was trying to deliver, it leaves you with food for thought.

There there are the moments in this collection that are powerful and leave an impact. Lines in these poems that just leave you left with the story that is being told. In particular, 'Grandmother, Praying' in particular comes to mind, with 'The Leaving season'. It is lines such as “Sun, in this life, I will be your daughter And you will teach me how to run” that just pack a punch and leave you provoked for a long time after you have read it.

An excellent collection of poetry that is clever and thought-provoking, I'm glad I got the opportunity to read it.

(I received an ARC from Netgalley for honest review).