A Cruelty Special to Our Species

“Yoon unflinchingly illustrates the horrors suffered by Korean ‘comfort women’ and grapples with trauma both experienced and inherited.” —The Paris Review

In her arresting debut 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.

“Reaching back to a historical trauma well before her own time, Emily Jungmin Yoon finds language to convey its horror and violence—painfully and unsparingly but somehow also with a delicacy, precision, and attention that does not impose the true (literal) brutality on the reader . . . This is an engaging, urgent book by a writer we must listen to.” —Amy Tan, #1 New York Times–bestselling author

“A heart-wrenching debut.” —The Washington Post

“Lovely, moving, and ultimately devastating.” —Chang-rae Lee, New York Times–bestselling author