House Work

Author: Cindy Juyoung Ok

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Press (2023)

In House Work, the unit of the house comes alive and cycles through its roles as need, world, and limit. The poems are charmed by containment and estranged by domesticity both in a specific house and in the imagined abstraction of home. Housework, house, and work come to reflect architectural and emotional structures more and more variously. 

"Cindy Juyoung Ok’s House Work is a revelation of the interior, and this collection sounds the measure of rooms and language, love and knowing, longing and safety. 'Form' she writes, 'outlives / you, but barely,' revealing that the boundaries of the poem are only slightly less precarious than that of the body, a home only slightly more stable than the field that surrounds it."

–Donika Kelly

"'A woman is a thing that absorbs,' the speaker declares in House Work by Cindy Juyoung Ok. 'I’m sorry we need to be bodies here.' Form, play, and an attention to—as well as an attending to—a world besieged by racialized ('marred by yellow / wages') and gendered ('to be an object of some / verb') labors combine in these profoundly intelligent poems. 'When it comes to survival there is no right / way but there’s no wrong way either.' Knowing that 'form outlives / you,' and that 'exile is always story,' Ok gives shape through cutting syntax, thrumming phonic echoes, and elegantly embroidered lines to new stories about estrangement, desire, and how the human imagination both rescues and restricts. These are poems I wish I’d written, and these are poems that’ll shift how you think. In fact, that’s the final command of this marvelous work: 'Think.'"

–Paul Tran

"I think what Cindy Juyoung Ok’s poems do is they misspeak ('don’t skid yourself') so as to speakbig, where speakbig is like writ large: the little glitch opens on to major malfunction. For example, 'my country / provides an illusion of synthesis, as my landlord supplies // a fantasy of individuality.' Or, 'Lack is spacious and, / a spring, seams me to it.' I think also that these poems are about the safety of a house, or rather 'the idea' of it. Something’s always snagging on the tooth of it. So the poems are also (don’t kid yourself) about threat which lurks through their dexterous, devious syntax: 'a swarm / from which I am wrung. As I, wrong, form.'"

–Aditi Machado