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In this folk-horror pastoral, poet Brian Sneeden threads paths of myth and ritual, fatherhood and climate collapse, ghost stories and grief.

Described by Kiki Petrosino as “a beautiful invasion,” Year of the Labyrinth draws upon Sneeden’s experiences as a translator and multilingual writer working in language preservation to explore boundaries between speech and ritual, myth and ecology. “In these fiercely imagined poems,” Petrosino writes, “our speaker passes between seemingly fixed physical and conceptual worlds—human/animal, past/present, forest/field. This voice finds lyric power in liminal spaces—in ‘the pollen line’ and ‘a change of wind.’ With the speaker, we travel through mirrors to places where you might grasp an animal if only ‘by the curve of its name,’ and where ‘a bird that ha[s]n’t yet been invented’ may sing. This poet’s imagination makes porous the landscapes we thought were familiar.” Kelly Link, in her judge’s citation for the Barthelme Prize, writes: “How wonderful it is, the marriage of economy and the arcane, as if a story could be a kind of lozenge that, slipped under the tongue, estranges us from our idea of how both life and language work. Every sentence has the effect of an acupuncturist’s needle, small pricks that let in strange energy.”

You Are the Phenomenology is a cross-genre book—a blend of poetry, songs, lyric prose, and invented forms—that explores the everyday junctures of perception, compassion, and multiplicity. How might our powers of association create shared experiences without distorting the contexts from which those experiences emerge?

One of the volume's innovative forms is a poetic series called “Quadrilaterals”—four-line poems that present the reader with various ways to leap associative gaps:

Quadrilateral : Pinch in Your Heel

Soars the mackled sound, kites ago :
A Polish boy thinks with accordions, adopts a stammer :
When were we first older than we wanted to be :
That was our city, our chisel, the corbeil from which we ate.

Historian and novelist Song WooHye chronicles the life of Yun Dong-ju (1917-1945), one of the most beloved and important poets in the modern Korean literary canon, widely considered Korea's "National Poet". Beginning with the history of the North Gando region (now Yanbian, China), where Yun was born, and ending with facts behind the publication of his only and posthumous poetry collection, Sky, Wind, Star, and Poem, this critical biography elucidates who Yun Dong-ju really was, with factual descriptions of the bleak and turbulent period of Japan’s colonization of Korea.
 
While first working on the book in the 1980s, Song had interviewed the poet’s surviving relatives and friends, most of whom have since passed away. Without her interviews, these important first-hand accounts would have been lost. Song had an added advantage of an “insider,” as she is a niece of Song Mong-gyu, who was the poet’s first cousin and inseparable friend for life. Incorporating newly discovered materials and using interviews with the beloved poet's family and friends, this biography is the most comprehensive, definitive biography of Yun Dong-ju to date, now available in English for the first time.
 

This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).