Jihyun Yun

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.

She has always known the rules – never resurrect anything larger than the palm of her hand, but that was before her sister died. A chilling, compulsive exploration of sisterhood, loss, and revenge. When her older sister is found mysteriously drowned in the river that cuts through their small coastal town, Soojin Han disregards every rule and uses her ancestral magic to bring Mirae back from the dead. At first, the sisters are overjoyed, reveling in late-night escapades and the miracle of being together again, but Mirae grows tired of hiding from the world. She becomes restless and hungry . . . Driven by an insatiable desire to finish what she started in life, to unravel the truth that crushed her family so many years ago, Mirae is out for revenge. When their town is engulfed by increasingly destructive rain and a series of harrowing, unusual deaths, Soojin is forced to reckon with the fact that perhaps the sister she brought back isn’t the one she knew.