Some Are Always Hungry

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. 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.

All Female    
My Grandmother Thinks of Love while Steeping Tea    
Passage, 1951    
Bone Soup, 1951    
For Now, Nothing Burns    
Diptych of Girl in 1953    
Field Notes from My Grandparents    
Immigration    
Homonyms    
I Revisit Myself in 1996    
War Soup    
The Daughter Transmorphic    
Yellow Fever    
Saga of the Nymph and the Woodcutter    
Fish Head Soup    
Recipe: ¿¿¿¿    
Diptych of Animal and Womb    
Aubade    
Mother Undresses    
Blood Type    
Lilith        
Husband Stitch    
The Tale of Janghwa and Hongryeon    
Caught        
Menstruation Triptych    
Some Are Always Hungry    
Immigration    
Benediction as Disdained Cuisine    
Praise        
Thirst        
Homecoming    
Savaging    
Revisitations    
The Leaving Season    
Reversal    
Grandmother, Praying    

Acknowledgments