From From: Poems

"“Where are you from from?” A fraught question that almost every immigrant or refugee gets asked. Monica Youn offers her bird’s-eye view of Western culture and the English language as a caustic yet nuanced response to this question, exposing cultural appropriation and solipsism via the myths of Echo and Narcissus, riffing on the various meanings of “ch***” as a racial slur directed at Asians, a crack or a breakthrough, and analyzing the active-passive relationship between the words “subject,” “object,” “project” and “abject.” Panoramic yet intimate, Youn’s lyricism illustrates how violence against the other is inseparable from fear and desire."