![]() “One by one they raped/all night long with filthy wordless bodies/my child’s body,” says another. “The first night an officer grabbed me/I drank disinfectant/but I didn’t die,” one narrator recounts. “I didn’t change the overarching story,” she says. Hewing closely to their accounts, she infused them with a spare lyricism. The 27-year-old Yoon, a Canadian citizen born in South Korea who now lives in Chicago, drew the poems from survivors’ oral histories. Mostly Korean, many just teenage girls, they were kidnapped or otherwise coerced into institutionalized sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. ![]() The centerpiece of the collection is “Testimonies,” a poetic sequence in the voices of the so-called comfort women. The Washington Post called the book “an arresting debut,” while The New York Review of Books noted that “Yoon delicately melds past and present to demonstrate how history, especially that of cruelty, endures.” Sexual violence against women, the hardships of war, and the persistence of ethnic prejudice are among the themes of Emily Jungmin Yoon C’13’s widely praised poetry collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species. ![]() An acclaimed debut collection balances dark themes with delight in language. ![]()
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