Monica Youn

Monica Youn Poems

Monica Youn Biography

Monica Youngna Youn is an American poet and lawyer. She was raised in Houston, Texas. She graduated from Princeton University, Yale Law School with a J.D., and Oxford University with a M. Phil, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She is the author of two books of poems. Her second collection Ignatz was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, among other journals. She has given readings at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), on NPR's All Things Considered and was a keynote reader at the 2012 AWP Conference. She teaches creative writing at Princeton University and at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She was previously the inaugural Brennan Center Constitutional Fellow at New York University Law School. She formerly directed the campaign finance reform project at the Brennan Center for Justice. She has appeared on PBS Newshour,Hardball with Chris Matthews, Bill Moyers Journal,and Need to Know (PBS).She is the editor of Money, Politics and the Constitution: Beyond Citizens United. She has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, and the House Committee on Administration. She was a pledged delegate for Obama in the 2008 presidential election. She has written for Slate,the Los Angeles Times, and the Huffington Post. She lives in Manhattan.)

The Best Poem Of Monica Youn

Stealing The Scream

It was hardly a high-tech operation, stealing The Scream.
That we know for certain, and what was left behind-
a store-bought ladder, a broken window,
and fifty-one seconds of videotape, abstract as an overture.
And the rest? We don't know. But we can envision
moonlight coming in through the broken window,
casting a bright shape over everything- the paintings,
the floor tiles, the velvet ropes: a single, sharp-edged pattern;
the figure's fixed hysteria rendered suddenly ironic
by the fact of something happening; houses
clapping a thousand shingle hands to shocked cheeks
along the road from Oslo to Asgardstrand;
the guards rushing in- too late!- greeted only
by the gap-toothed smirk of the museum walls;
and dangling from the picture wire like a baited hook,
a postcard: 'Thanks for the poor security.'
The policemen, lost as tourists, stand whispering
in the galleries: '. . .but what does it all mean?'
Someone has the answers, someone who, grasping the frame,
saw his sun-red face reflected in that familiar boiling sky.

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