Monica Youn, the author of Barter (Graywolf, 2003), lives in New York, where she is an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. Her political commentary has appeared in Slate, Roll Call, and The Huffington Post. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University and Pratt Institute. For her work on Ignatz, she has been awarded the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
“In Monica Youn’s stunningly imaginative series Ignatz, George Herriman’s comic-strip villainous mouse, Ignatz, is demoused and, with inexhaustible invention, transformed into an object of passion [...] Youn dips what would otherwise be black comedy into the honey pot of untiring desire: 'O pity us // Ignatz O come to us by moonlight / O arch your speckled body over the earth.' [...] Spare, choice, witty, daring, musical, itself never tiring, Youn’s style is more than equal to both the romanticism and the grimness.”
—Cal Bedient
“Modernist, secret philosopher, ironic medium, dialectician, inventor of a terse exuberance, hypocrites’ steely antagonist [...] Monica Youn is all those things in these astonishing, compact poems, whose spare lines and dense clusters unfold almost illimitably into panels and landscapes and transcontinental journeys. [...] No poet of Youn’s generation has made more demands on herself—and none has done more in her art.”
—Stephen Burt
Four Way Books
