Room Colon Nine
Madeleine (Yeh Jin) Moon-Chun
Eastwind Books: 2025
Paperback: New
9781961562103
From author's introduction to the poems in ROOM COLON NINE. Numbers are symbolic parts of our traditions, religions, superstitions, and daily lives. Many buildings in the United States don't include the thirteenth floor in writing, as it is considered unlucky. Three, on the other hand, "is the charm." In Korean tradition, the 100th day after a baby is born is cause for a ceremony and a gathering of the community. In the United States, some of the most important birthdays are when someone turns sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one, and fifty. For many Latin American cultures, girls who turn fifteen have their quinceañera. Judaism considers thirteen to be when children reach the age of symbolic adulthood. For many Asian countries, the age sixty is celebrated, as it signifies the person has lived through all twelve zodiac signs five times-once for each different universal element. And the list goes on. While various countries and cultures have their own ceremonious ages and numbers, the overarching current of similarity is the symbolic weight we humans place on numbers.
Ultimately, ROOM COLON NINE is the endlessly paradoxical vertex, or axis, at which beginnings and endings collide, are reconsidered, and are formed anew. The number nine has played a significant role in my life, and I believe that it possesses much meaning regarding the intersections of time, space, belonging, and other philosophical matters that remain painfully relevant in our current day.
Contributor Bio: Moon-Chun, Madeleine
Madeleine (Yeh-Jin) Moon-Chun is a high school student from Georgia. Her debut poetry collection Not Made of Lines: Poetic Meditations on Time, Space, & Other Matters was also published by Eastwind Books of Berkeley in 2024. She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Student Pedagogies for Social Change, a literary magazine spotlighting youth voices on issues surrounding social justice. She is the author of the article "Starting a Teen Journal of Asian American Studies: Teen Voices as Critical Pedagogical Method" in the Journal of Asian American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press), 2024. She is a passionate birder and naturalist. Check out her website, Birding for Beauty, https: //www.birdingforbeauty.org/. In her spare time, she likes running, playing board games, and spending time with friends and family.