Sun Yung Shin calls her readers into the unknown now-future of the human species, an underworld museum of births, deaths, evolutions, and extinctions.
Personal and environmental violations form the backdrop against which Sun Yung Shin examines questions of grievability, violence, and responsibility in
The Wet Hex.
Incorporating sources such as her own archival immigration documents, Ovid’s
Metamorphoses,
Christopher Columbus’s journals, and traditional Korean burial rituals, Shin explores the ways that lives are weighed and bartered. Smashing the hierarchies of god and humanity, heaven and hell, in favor of indigenous Korean shamanism and animism,
The Wet Hex
layers an apocalyptic revision of nineteenth-century imagery of the sublime over the present, conjuring a reality at once beautiful and terrible.