Includes bibliographical references.

Translate this body into everything -- (Section 1). THERE IS / NEVER / ENOUGH -- A spade is for piercing the ground and a shovel is for heaving -- Mines and museums, or, the DMZ is a nature preserve -- Behind this door is a Siberian tiger -- An orphan receives her commercial DNA test results from two companies : an Abecedarian -- Castaways in paradise -- History of domestication -- How an animal knows where she ends and you begin -- An orphan considers the hand of god -- (Section 2). VIOLENCE IS NOT A METAPHOR -- Botany of death -- Detonations -- Bayonets and bonfire -- Specimens of immortality -- I wandered into a mass extinction event -- He said that we should turn back -- (Section 3). THE UNDERWORLD HOLDS ALL TETHERS -- Gaze _ Observatory _ Threshold : A [...] Baridegi Reimagining -- (Section 4). FATE IS A DEBT -- The wolvish forage -- Unnatural selection -- A black box theory of descent -- The binding -- Wheels of misfortune -- In the house of moths -- Our country laundered us -- (Section 5). A WHITE FORKED FLAME -- Sublime : sailing through a midnight sea -- Whiteness : a spell thrown -- Fish scales all over this ark -- Ravishing migrations -- Transit from lintel to lintel -- My first voyage out -- Tiger : fade in, fade out -- Evolution in the underworld -- Lullaby, goodnight -- Appendix. L'Etranger, an unburial, a funeral.

"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' 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"-- Provided by publisher.