A Cruelty Special to Our Species

Starred review from August 20, 2018
Yoon recasts narratives of the Korean “comfort women” held captive under Japanese occupation during WWII in this devastating debut comprising persona poems. Born in 1991, the year former comfort women came forward for the first time, Yoon preempts potential criticisms of appropriation in her brief introduction. “I’d like my poetry to serve to amplify and speak these women’s stories, not speak for them,” she writes. And to her credit, she does, in these well-researched, clear expressions spoken in the voices of women “drafted” into service, forced to take Japanese names, raped, tortured, and murdered: “I told him/ I did not understand his order/ and his kind of factory and he laughed/ Girls arrived got sick pregnant injected/ with so many drugs nameless animals/ exploded on top of us.” Reused condoms and discarded infants, syphilis and the sick buried alive blend into the chauvinism of U.S. soldiers who would arrive for the next phase of war. Yoon also delves into personal, lived difficulties of immigration: “Bell Theory” invents a music from the cruelty and love embedded in language, while “Time, in Whales” sees another endangered species “detect where one/ another comes from/ through song.” Yoon’s is a brave new voice that respects how the past informs the present.