ANDREW YOON is New York-based Korean-American artist involved in music, poetry, and computers. Lately he is writing poems that change, making music with paint and dance, live-coding sounds, and leading the Melodica Drone and Bach Orchestra. He is the founder of the arts journal and small press Nothing to Say. As a free culture advocate everything he makes is under copyleft licenses, including this collection. He can be found online at andrewyoon.art.

"These particular poems invite us up with their observations, questions, and daydreams—and they are just instances of a wider poetic possibility that Andrew Yoon has programmed. By giving both this text and his word-combining code freely to the commons, Yoon offers his poetics in operational form, for anyone to appreciate on another level: To study, modify, or build upon."

—Nick Montfort, author/programmer of Golem

“It’s no news. We are living in the darkening penumbras of late capitalism—crunched time and compact physical spaces. Our geological clock is running out. In the ensuing snafu, I’m somewhat consoled by the generosity of poems, their capacity, once sharpened and shared, to hold open a durable exit. This poetry collection’s generosity is unequivocal, starting from the title: We Are Invited to Climb. In Andrew Yoon’s hands, language transforms into a lush and incandescent springhead, at once thirst-inducing and refreshing, and most importantly inexhaustible in what it can become. These poems occupy their material space with graceful ambivalence—this way and then that way—as if in homage to the ontology of their chanced origin. With their inventiveness and bohemian bluster, these poems reject the syntactic limits we’ve placed on our interactions with each other. The size of the physical book makes the collection a movable feast: small enough to fit into the breast pocket of a shirt and warm enough to stay there for the length of a trip.”

—Chibuihe Obi Achimba, author of hallowed

“Gaston Bachelard once wrote that ‘every path encourages us to ascend.’ In Andrew Yoon’s astonishing book, We Are Invited to Climb, this same encouragement lifts us—poem after poem, line after line. His is that rare human document that invites the very inner best of his readers to wonder and to startle and to be alive anew as he writes ‘we try to imagine what it would sound like if the leaves on every tree were poems written on little sheets of paper.’ And so through the alchemy of his dear art, the whole world becomes a poem as if for the very first time.”

—Robert Vivian, author of All I Feel Is Rivers

“Amidst so much representational writing, so much reproduction and fixedness, Andrew Yoon’s chance poems challenge the very notion of writing-as-product or book-as-object, as they shift and shimmy, refusing to solidify into anything other than vast possibility. We Are Invited to Climb is a special treat for fans of OuLiPo or readers who want their minds to laugh with every unexpected combination, every new image available only in unmoored language.”

—Patrick Madden, author of Quotidiana and Disparates