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    A Cruelty Special to Our Species: Poems
    A Cruelty Special to Our Species: Poems
    A Cruelty Special to Our Species: Poems
    Audiobook1 hour

    A Cruelty Special to Our Species: Poems

    Written by Emily Jungmin Yoon

    Narrated by Emily Jungmin Yoon

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A piercing debut collection of poems exploring gender, race, and violence from a sensational new talent.

    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 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. “What is a body in a stolen country,” Yoon asks. “What is right in war.”

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateSep 18, 2018
    ISBN9780062864710
    Author

    Emily Jungmin Yoon

    Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes, the 2017 winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize by Tupelo Press. Yoon was born in Busan, Republic of Korea and received her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and MFA in Creative Writing at New York University. She has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, AWP’s WC&C Scholarship Competition, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Her poems and translations have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, POETRY, The New York Times Magazine, and Korean Literature Now. She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is a PhD student studying Korean literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

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    • 5/5
      A Cruelty Special To Our Species:Poems by Emily Jungmin Yoon 2018 Harper Collins 4.5 / 5.0 This packs so much emotion, fear, and heartbreak, it is hard to grasp. The poems here share the brutality and sexual violence against women. Specifically, Korean ¨comfort women¨, women captured and forced to have sex with soldiers in Japanese occupied territories during WWII. Many of the soldiers were American. Let that sink in.....The forced violence, and deaths pissed me off. It was difficult to read and devastating to think about or invision.....it moves you and terrifies you at the same time.This is Jungmin Yoons debut. Her vitality, energy, and strength are amazing. I will look forward to more from her.This is what poetry is all about.