LibGuides: Visiting Writers' Series LibGuide: Monica Youn

Monica Youn

Monica Yuon Photo by Eldridge Morrissey via the Poetry Foundation

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INTERVIEWS

Interview with Prairie Schooner
Eric Farwell delves into Monica Youn's background and how her work as an attorney has influenced her writing.
The Rumpus Interview with Monica Youn
"The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Monica Youn about her new collection Blackacre, hypothetical tracts of land, Milton, and infertility."

PODCASTS

Monica Youn Reads Afaa Michael Weaver
Monica Youn joins Paul Muldoon to read and discuss Afaa Michael Weaver’s “Passing Through Indian Territory,” and her own poem “Goldacre.”

Many works by our Visiting Writers' Series authors are pulled from their normal places on the shelves and temporarily located in a special display in the Browsing Collection. This collection is located near the Information Commons service desk, next to the vending machines and newspapers.

When you look at an item's record in WorldCat Discovery, be sure to note whether the items is in the General Stacks (mostly 2nd floor) or the Browsing Collection (1st floor). If you have any questions about locating an item on the shelf, don't hesitate to ask us!

Remember - if we don't own it or our copy is currently checked out, you probably can still get a copy through PALShare or interlibrary loan! Learn more.

Ignatz by Monica Youn
"A collection of love poems based on George Herriman's comic strip characters Ignatz Mouse and Krazy Kat."
Barter by Monica Youn
"The poems in Barter, Monica Youn's exciting first collection, negotiate transactions between scarcity and excess, pornography and abstraction, the thing and the thing seen. Rendered with a dazzling array of structures and allusions, these poems describe―and become―a strange gallery of paintings and portraits. She offers a Polaroid left on a windshield, step-by-step instructions for "Drawing for Absolute Beginners," a stereoscope with a box of slides. Both an homage to and a warning against nonexistent things, Barter introduces a vibrant new voice and a new way of seeing." - Amazon description
Blackacre by Monica Youn
“'Blackacre'” is a centuries-old legal fiction―a placeholder name for a hypothetical estate. Treacherously lush or alluringly bleak, these poems reframe their subjects as landscape, as legacy―a bereavement, an intimacy, a racial identity, a pubescence, a culpability, a diagnosis. With a surveyor’s keenest tools, Youn marks the boundaries of the given, what we have been allotted: acreage that has been ruthlessly fenced, previously tenanted, ploughed and harvested, enriched and depleted. In the title sequence, the poet gleans a second crop from the field of Milton’s great sonnet on his blindness: a lyric meditation on her barrenness, on her own desire―her own struggle―to conceive a child. What happens when the transformative imagination comes up against the limits of unalterable fact?"- Amazon description

"Youn is perhaps best known to the general public for her work in the courtroom. She earned a reputation as a formidable copyright attorney, representing high-profile clients like Beyoncé while at the same time working for nonprofits seeking low-cost legal assistance. "I was a writer at Princeton, very interested in the written text," Youn said in an interview with Anna Leader appearing in the Tab. "I did a degree in English at Oxford, and I thought that with that background, copyright law made sense. When I got out of law school and was looking for a way to practice, the only way to do that was in entertainment. I mostly focused on music law, but occasionally I worked with TV and film." Still, she remained committed to poetry. Her first collection, Barter (in which, declared Ellen Kaufman in Library Journal, "writes most convincingly about the middle regions of the United States, including her native Texas"), was published in 2003. It was followed by Ignatz, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and by Blackacre.

Source: "Monica Youn." Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2016. Biography in Context. Accessed 2 June 2017.

Monica Youn Poetry Foundation Biography

MONICA YOUN REVIEWS AND CRITICISM

DATABASES

Literary Sources This link opens in a new window
Literary Sources provides information in primary sources, critical articles, literary and cultural analysis, and biographies.

New York Times Book Review
This link will take you to the New York Times Book Review hosted on the Literature Resource Center database. It includes issues from 2001 to present. You can search within the entire publication (box at top of page) or you can select a specific year from the drop-down menu. Older issues are available via other databases - ask a librarian for help accessing these issues.
Library Journal Books Reviews
Click on the Library Journal link (use the one that has more full texts available) to access it through the Butler library. Use the author's name as your search term in the "search within the publication" box to find reviews of her work

Visiting Writers' Series LibGuide: Monica Youn

Monica Youn

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