![]() ![]() I feel very lucky to have read Emily Jungmin Yoon’s poetry this early in this career and will stay on the lookout for more. Timeless, relentless and absolutely spectacular. It’s a short collection, even for a poetry book, but it contains so much truth and pain on origins, race, womanhood, war, alienation, and language. Author of A CRUELTY SPECIAL TO OUR SPECIES (EccoHarperCollins 2018) & chapbook ORDINARY MISFORTUNES (Tupelo Press 2017). I am definitely going to read some non-fiction about “comfort women” later (perhaps the fascinating oral history mentioned in this book’s acknowledgements) but meanwhile I just want to reread “A Cruelty Special to Our Species”, and to savor all its depth again. A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily Jungmin Yoon is a tender and sharp collection that navigates the history of comfort women used by the Japanese Empire during World War II. And this poetry book with an absolutely incomparable name became the unlikely but satisfying read on the subject. ![]() ![]() I’ve been dying to read about the tragic history of “comfort women” since I, an immigrant to the US, and not that well-versed on East Asian history, first heard about them on the radio. The writing in A Cruelty Special to our Species discusses sexual violence as a tool of war, but by the end of the book, you find that Yoon’s depiction of violence extends beyond that. ![]()
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