Her poems beautifully lift the voices of these women, helping to make them heard and remembered - while also providing insight into current events, environmentalism, and her own personal experiences as a woman in the world.ĭuring her interview, Emily Jungmin Yoon recommends Autobiography of Death (New Directions Books, 2018), written by Kim Hyesoon and translated by Don Mee Choi, and Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) by Choi.Īndrea Blythe is a co-host of the New Books in Poetry podcast. At its core these poems delves into the lives of Korean comfort women of the 1930s and 40s, reflecting on not only the history of sexual slavery, but also considering its ongoing impact. 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.In her first full-length collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco Books, 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon examines forms of violence against women. “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. 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. A piercing debut collection of poems exploring gender, race, and violence from a sensational new talent
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