A Cruelty Special to Our Species: Poems

by Emily Jungmin Yoon Narrated by Emily Jungmin Yoon

Overview

A piercing debut collection of poems exploring gender, race, and violence from a sensational new talent.

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*Korean*so-called "comfort women," women who were forced into sexual labor 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, bringing powerful voice to 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 listeners 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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 08/20/2018
Yoon recasts narratives of the Korean “comfort women” held captive under Japanese occupation during WWII in this devastating debut comprising persona poems. Born in 1991, the year former comfort women came forward for the first time, Yoon preempts potential criticisms of appropriation in her brief introduction. “I’d like my poetry to serve to amplify and speak these women’s stories, not speak for them,” she writes. And to her credit, she does, in these well-researched, clear expressions spoken in the voices of women “drafted” into service, forced to take Japanese names, raped, tortured, and murdered: “I told him/ I did not understand his order/ and his kind of factory and he laughed/ Girls arrived got sick pregnant injected/ with so many drugs nameless animals/ exploded on top of us.” Reused condoms and discarded infants, syphilis and the sick buried alive blend into the chauvinism of U.S. soldiers who would arrive for the next phase of war. Yoon also delves into personal, lived difficulties of immigration: “Bell Theory” invents a music from the cruelty and love embedded in language, while “Time, in Whales” sees another endangered species “detect where one/ another comes from/ through song.” Yoon’s is a brave new voice that respects how the past informs the present. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

With searing witness and quietly prodigious song here is a volume that speaks sharp truths to those who would wish the forgetting of one of the darkest hours of humanity. A lovely, moving, and ultimately devastating book.” — Chang-rae Lee

“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, which makes these poems all the more shocking and unforgettable.” — Amy Tan

“Emily Jungmin Yoon’s...un-erring lyrical sense, evident in all her poems, including these meditations on slavery and rape, allow her to transcend the limits of language itself. From her refusal of dismissive epiphany to the profound linguistic insights that underscore these rare searching poems, beauty occurs.” — Carol Muske-Dukes

“[A] deeply reverent debut collection. . . [Yoon] writes these poems in her second language, an English in which she takes mindful, absorbing residence while her ‘native tongue is a code’ that orchestrates with brimming precision what can be imagined, mourned, remembered, invented and haunted.” — Eleanor Chai

“The poems...are miracles of clarity and precision that are all the more miraculous because their strength, piercing lyricism, and transparent humanity never quaver or falter or step back for a second.” — Vijay Seshadri

“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

Washington Post

A heart-wrenching debut...Yoon’s work is compelling in part because it shows the importance of understanding history and its enduring impact.

Chang-rae Lee

With searing witness and quietly prodigious song here is a volume that speaks sharp truths to those who would wish the forgetting of one of the darkest hours of humanity. A lovely, moving, and ultimately devastating book.

Amy Tan

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, which makes these poems all the more shocking and unforgettable.

Vijay Seshadri

The poems...are miracles of clarity and precision that are all the more miraculous because their strength, piercing lyricism, and transparent humanity never quaver or falter or step back for a second.

Carol Muske-Dukes

Emily Jungmin Yoon’s...un-erring lyrical sense, evident in all her poems, including these meditations on slavery and rape, allow her to transcend the limits of language itself. From her refusal of dismissive epiphany to the profound linguistic insights that underscore these rare searching poems, beauty occurs.

Eleanor Chai

[A] deeply reverent debut collection. . . [Yoon] writes these poems in her second language, an English in which she takes mindful, absorbing residence while her ‘native tongue is a code’ that orchestrates with brimming precision what can be imagined, mourned, remembered, invented and haunted.

Washington Post

A heart-wrenching debut...Yoon’s work is compelling in part because it shows the importance of understanding history and its enduring impact.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173659057
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	09/18/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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