Winner of the 2024 Gatewood Prize, I AM RETURNING FOR THE BODY explores and maps liminal experiences—the posthuman, hybridity and diaspora, the afterlife, and the uncertainties of our real and imagined dystopias—through work that pushes genre boundaries and interweaves the primordial and futuristic, documentarian and autobiographical, narrative and musical, and sacred and profane. Through a pentaptych structure, these poems illuminate the pathways we may uncover as we press deeper into the dark—fashioning beings of metal, electricity, and light, only to return home to ourselves, to the softness of the body. Questions which arise are: How do we protect what is sacred to us through this new dark? What do we carry with us through the fires, and how do we carry it so it does not burn? There is alchemy in this process of searching. Perhaps along the way, we may find that paradise was always a myth—but that there is something much stranger and much more hopeful waiting for us on the other side.
“I AM RETURNING FOR THE BODY is a poetry of much-needed truth. We need company, guidance, and light to see each other by—running, as if into a river, into Han's cosmic and cellular song cycle, rippling with polyglot cyborg-theory music and ghost fractals. This work defies the totalitarian atmosphere of our cultural moment—the relentless erasure and denial of human ecstasy, pain, love, and our imaginations—by documenting a resistance to that nihilism. Han's brilliance brings clarity and a miraculous, essential joy to the terrifying paradoxes of our time. She is a poet who bends light and interprets shadow in order to show readers the real powers at play, the true art/ache/arc of humanity's psyche. We read her and we begin to understand.” — Brenda Shaughnessy, author of Our Andromeda
“The first thing I noticed about Rachel Jihye Han's I AM RETURNING FOR THE BODY is its range: these poems traverse memory and nature, superstition and the body, grief and music, diaspora and the post-human. Han urges the reader to ‘remember what is luminous in this new dark,’ reminding us that intergenerational trauma does not have to define the self or one’s body. But it’s not just the weight of these themes that led me to select this collection for the Gatewood Prize; it’s also Han’s agile movement across the page, her obsidian-sharp line breaks (e.g., 'now they know / mercy'), and comprehensive facility with form and formatting that anchored these poems to the material that impressed me so. Han’s achievement demands one’s attention at the intersection of subject and poetic construction, like 'musician and instrument bonded by a love not of this earth.'" — Emilia Philips, 2024 Gatewood Prize judge and author of Nonbinary Bird of Paradise
“‘I know the planets sing, but I don’t have time to listen,’ states the formidable speaker of Han’s striking debut collection in which memory, history, and myth power a whirlwind journey through the sublime landscapes of science and technology. Her poems rocket us into the infinite solar system with the same ease that they interlace us into strands of DNA. No space is too vast or too minute to explore or absorb into the skin, blood, and tissue of our imaginations. What a gorgeous, sensory experience awaiting those who enter I AM RETURNING FOR THE BODY.” — Rigoberto González, author of The Book of Ruin​​
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​Rachel Jihye Han is a poet, composer, and multi-instrumentalist living in New York. She received an MFA in Poetry from Rutgers University-Newark, where she currently teaches English and Poetry. A 2023 MacDowell Fellow, 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow, and 2022 Hawthornden Castle Fellow, her work has appeared in Narrative, Pleiades, Interim, Conduit, Spectra, and elsewhere.​
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