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.
“What is a body in a stolen country,” Yoon asks. 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. Born in Busan, Republic of Korea, Yoon earned her BA in. Her first full-length collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, was published by Ecco in 2018. 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. Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017), winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize, selected by Maggie Smith. A piercing debut collection of poems exploring gender, race, and violence from a sensational new talent.
0 kommentar(er)
