A Cruelty Special To Our Species: Poems
by Emily Jungmin Yoon
Buy on AmazonA Cruelty Special to Our Species is the debut poetry collection by South Korean–born poet Emily Jungmin Yoon, published in 2018 by Ecco Press. It was published while Yoon was a doctoral student studying East Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago. It has poems that address the history of comfort women who were exploited by Imperial Japan during World War II. It won the Devil's Kitchen Reading Award for poetry and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
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"In this searing debut collection, Emily Jungmin Yoon uses poetry to trace the history of Korean “comfort women,” who were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese soldiers during World War II. Yoon’s poems understand this fate as both harrowing and also historically ordinary; they reverberate with a tenderness that enlarges them out of their place or moment and also invites us in to empathize, to consider the deep links between war and sexual violence. “On Wednesdays, it rains// for the children they bore. For the children/ they could not bear For the children/ they were.” This is a skilled, rich, mesmerizing opening to a new poetic career."
NPR Books We Love — 2018 · apps.npr.org