Ward Toward
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Yale University Press
Published:23rd Apr '24
Should be back in stock very soon
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£30.00(9780300273915)
Yale Younger Poet Cindy Juyoung Ok resolutely searches for hope in spaces of fragmentation
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book, 2024 • Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, 2024
“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.
“Cindy Juyoung Ok’s unpublished manuscript won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. . . . We can see why.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“Ok in her refreshing debut uses language to push against the staid edges of the status quo, exposing the tenuous and often contradictory beliefs that seemingly undergird reality. With their capacious perspective, these verses bear witness to the hypocrisies of convention on the personal and global scale.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“In Ward Toward, Ok takes language apart: questioning its origin, proposed syntax, and meaning to separate the form from its built-in rules.”—Chloe Xiang, Los Angeles Review of Books
“A quietly devastating testament of domestic violence.”—Judges of the 2024 Forward Prize for Poetry (Winner for Best Single Poem—Written)
“Cindy Juyoung Ok’s debut moves through spaces seamlessly—psych ward, hospice care, nation upon nation—and unites them through an impressive articulation of their violences.”—Summer Farah, The Millions, “Must-Read Poetry: Winter 2024”
2024 John Leonard Prize finalist, for the best first book in any genre, sponsored by the NBCC
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, Poetry category
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem—Written, sponsored by the Forward Arts Foundation
California Book Awards Silver Medal Winner, sponsored by Commonwealth Club World Affairs
Shortlisted for the 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award, sponsored by the Kansas City Public Library
“Ward Toward is a piercing debut: a startle, a fissioning. These poems fragment, cleave and cluster, seek new grammars, strategize not for cohesion but proximity, convergence.”—Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations
“Reading Cindy Juyoung Ok’s poems is like witnessing the Big Bang in close-up slow motion—infinite collisions of syntax, thought and emotion—pyrotechnic and glorious. This debut volume spectacularly showcases an utterly singular poetic sensibility.”—Monica Youn, author of From From
“A delectable, scintillating read that leaps long into strangely elegant foray. In the dwelled, survived, and warded world, this poetic is utterly remarkable and calls for a rainstorm of awards.”—Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, author of Look at This Blue
“Cindy Juyoung Ok is a wonderfully inventive poet. . . . She writes in many forms, some invented, and her constant impulse is to break the frame, to escape oppressive containment.”—Rae Armantrout, from the Foreword to Ward Toward
ISBN: 9780300273922
Dimensions: 235mm x 156mm x 8mm
Weight: unknown
100 pages