Ward Toward (Volume 118) (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

“There are places,” Cindy Juyoung Ok writes, “where shaking is expected, loss is / assumed.” In the 118th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok moves assuredly between spaces—from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided countries to hospice wards. She plumbs these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of each reality’s language, word to word, as she uncovers fractured private codes and shares them in argument, song, and prayer. Using visual play in invented forms, Ok counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person’s character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. The poems disrupt expectation with the comedy of institutionalized teens, nostalgia after the climate crisis, tenderness in a nursing home, and the wholeness of faltering Englishes. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Ok’s resolute, energized debut shifts language’s fissures to reassemble them into a new place of belonging. Yale Younger Poet Cindy Juyoung Ok resolutely searches for hope in spaces of fragmentation There are places, Cindy Juyoung Ok writes, where shaking is expected, loss is / assumed. In the 118th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok moves assuredly between spacesfrom the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided Palestine to divided Korea, from a bedroom that is the site of domestic abuse to a hospice ward that is the site of neglect. Ok plumbs these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of language, word to word, as she uncovers not only fragmentation and confinement but hope, humor, and human connection. Using visual poetry and found text, she counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a persons character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. How do pagodas, Seinfeld , ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Oks energizing debut begins the work of breaking language to find the fissures where it can be reassembled into a new place of belonging.