19/06/2025
The latest title from Switchback Books, Rachel Jihye Han’s “I AM RETURNING FOR THE BODY,” is now available for purchase at switchbackbooks.com. Winner of the 2024 Gatewood Prize, I AM RETURNING FOR THE BODY explores and maps liminal experiences—the posthuman, hybridity and diaspora, the afterlife, and the uncertainties of our real and imagined dystopias—through work that pushes genre boundaries and interweaves the primordial and futuristic, documentarian and autobiographical, narrative and musical, and sacred and profane. Through a pentaptych structure, these poems illuminate the pathways we may uncover as we press deeper into the dark—fashioning beings of metal, electricity, and light, only to return home to ourselves, to the softness of the body. Questions which arise are: How do we protect what is sacred to us through this new dark? What do we carry with us through the fires, and how do we carry it so it does not burn? There is alchemy in this process of searching. Perhaps along the way, we may find that paradise was always a myth—but that there is something much stranger and much more hopeful waiting for us on the other side.
