Distributed by YesYes Books and Ingram
Cover & Interior Design: Olivia Hammerman
Cover Art: Rochelle Youk
$14 | 38 pages | ISBN: 978-1-946303-08-0
Poetry l Perfectbound | April 22, 2025
Praise for Year of the Sheep
Year of the Sheep bravely tackles the nuanced and fractured experiences and identities of a talented Korean-American poet and scholar. Written in a vulnerable, exquisite, confessional style and voice, this dynamic debut vigorously explores the many pressures and anxieties of assimilation on the first-gen experience. The poetics and word acumen are top level and skillfully lull the reader into their unique world. This is a genuinely remarkable debut! I highly recommend it.
—Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of Bad Mexican, Bad American
Stacey Park’s Year of the Sheep is a luminous collection brimming with multiple versions of the “I,” navigating their relationship with family, mental health, language, and religion, with both woe and wonder. All the selves, like the Korean-I, “the girl who could be loved by the neighborhood”-I, the child-I, and the animal-I, come together and scatter like waves, crashing and breaking into heartrending and radiant reckonings of what they have loved, lost, and longed for. This book is a beautiful place that “asks us to heed / what’s strange.”
—Emily Jungmin Yoon, author of A Cruelty Special to our Species: Poems
Year of the Sheep
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About the book
The poems in Stacey Park’s Year of the Sheep are immigrant songs. Using the poetic imagination as a space to represent the complexities of assimilation, cultural hybridity, and a religious upbringing, this collection explores the link between language, location, and self. The mix of natural imagery and pop culture references culminate in a nostalgic hum that yearns for home, wherever and whatever that might be. In Korean, it is common to use a collective pronoun like “our'' and “we,” when referencing something that is exclusively one’s own. This sense of “our'' reinforces the notion that an individual is always part of the collective. From all sides, the speaker is bombarded with ways of belonging—the fear of being left by the herd haunts them. Park offers a speaker who questions the predetermined paths and pervasive narratives that try to dictate the major actions and events of a good immigrant life. They seek a way to honor the “we” while forging an “I” on their own terms.
About the author
Stacey Park is a writer, teacher, and scholar. She was born in Seoul, grew up in Vancouver, B.C., and now lives in southern California. Her chapbook Year of the Sheep (YesYes Books, 2025) was a finalist in the 2023 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest at YesYes Books. Previously, her work has been published in Decomp Journal, Baltimore Review, Portland Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Cortland Review, Curator Magazine, and elsewhere. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Toronto and an MFA in Creative Writing from CSU, Long Beach. Currently, she teaches English at LA Valley College. In her free time, she is working on a full-length manuscript and writing music.
