Reaching back to a historical trauma well before her own time, Emily Jungmin Yoon finds language to convey its horror and violence-painfully and unsparingly but somehow also with a delicacy, precision, and attention that does not impose the true (literal) brutality on the reader...This is an engaging, urgent book by a writer we must listen to.
-- "Amy Tan, #1 New York Times bestselling author"
[A] devastating debut comprising persona poems...Yoon's is a brave new voice that respects how the past informs the present.
-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"
A heart-wrenching debut...Yoon's work is compelling in part because it shows the importance of understanding history and its enduring impact.
-- "Washington Post"
Much of Yoon's arresting debut memorializes the Korean 'comfort women' who were forced into prostitution during World War II; it draws considerable power from the testimonies of actual survivors.
-- "New York Times Book Review"
With searing witness and quietly prodigious song, here is a volume that speaks sharp truths...Lovely, moving, and ultimately devastating.
-- "Chang-rae Lee, New York Times bestselling author" A piercing debut collection of poems from a sensational new talent exploring gender, race, and violence
In her arresting collection, urgently relevant for our times, poet Emily Jungmin Yoon confronts the histories of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on so-called comfort women, Korean women who worked in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II.
In wrenching language, A Cruelty Special to Our Species unforgettably describes the brutalities of war and the fear and sorrow of those whose lives and bodies were swept up by a colonizing power, amplifying the voices of an oppressed group of people whose histories have often been erased and overlooked. “What is a body in a stolen country?” Yoon asks. “What is right in war?”
Moving readers through time, space, and different cultures, and bringing vivid life to the testimonies and confessions of the victims, Yoon takes possession of a painful and shameful history even while unearthing moments of rare beauty in acts of resistance and resilience, and in the instinct to survive and bear witness.
About the Author
Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes, the 2017 winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize by Tupelo Press. Yoon was born in Busan in the Republic of Korea and received her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and MFA in creative writing at New York University. She has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from Ploughshares' Emerging Writer's Contest, AWP's WC&C Scholarship Competition, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Her poems and translations have appeared in publications including the New Yorker, POETRY, the New York Times Magazine, and Korean Literature Now. She currently serves as the poetry editor for the Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and is a PhD student studying Korean literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.
