A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily Jungmin Yoon

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. “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. In 2017, Yoon was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.A piercing debut collection of poems exploring gender, race, and violence from a sensational new talent

Her poems and translations have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry magazine, Columbia Journal Online, Pinwheel, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is pursuing a PhD in Korean literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. A piercing debut collection of poems exploring gender, race, and violence from a sensational new talent In her arresting collection, urgently relevant for. Born in Busan, Republic of Korea, Yoon earned her BA in English and communication at the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA in creative writing at New York University, where she served as an award editor for the Washington Square Review and received a Starworks Fellowship. Her first full-length collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, was published by Ecco in 2018. Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017), winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize, selected by Maggie Smith. A Cruelty Special to Our Species Asian American Writers Workshop Poetry Tuesday A Cruelty Special to Our Species She is girl.

A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily Jungmin Yoon