In the “Testimonies” section of A Cruelty to Our Species, Emily Jungmin Yoon draws directly upon the recorded accounts of former “comfort women” as preserved in Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military (ed. Sangmie Choi Schellstede) and True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women (ed. Keith Howard). By interlacing the survivors’ words with her own poetic language, Yoon creates a dialogic form that both preserves and reframes these narratives. Her work functions not only as a literary rendering of testimonial material but also as an act of cultural memory, elevating the voices of women whose histories have been systematically marginalized, distorted, or effaced.
Visit the Poetry Foundation to read selections from her work and an interview with the poet.
About the poet:
Emily Jungmin Yoon is a poet, translator, editor, and scholar. She is the author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco | HarperCollins, 2018), winner of the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017). Her translation and editorial work includes Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets (Tilted Axis, 2019), and her second full-length collection, Find Me as the Creature I Am, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2024.
Her poetry and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review. She has received fellowships and awards from the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf, and Ploughshares, among others. She is currently Assistant Professor of Korean literature at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She also serves as Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.