A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily Jungming Yoon

A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily Jungming Yoon 

A Cruelty Special to Our Species is a collection of 40 poems, divided into four sections, The Charge, The Testimonies, The Confession, The After, named for the parts of a legal proceedings. The crime is the sexual enslavement of young Korean girls and women, known as “comfort women” or “wianbu”, by Japanese soldiers in Japanese-occupied territories during WWII. There is a thorough acknowledgments page in the front of the book, as well as a comprehensive Author’s Note to get one acquainted with the history before The Charge is laid out. 

  

The poems in The Charge go into gruesome detail—the Author’s note is a grand overview and charge of sexual enslavement, but the poems convey the little cruelties, the additional charges, for which, perhaps no one has ever paid.  

Several different poems with the same title, An Ordinary Misfortune, can be found in three of the four sections, and come from a same-titled, earlier book of poetry written by Yoon on the same subject. In this section, these poems appear four times. They are prose poems. The other poems in this section are freeverse.  

Testimonies mixes Yoon’s own language and the written testimonies of some of the women previously enslaved to create freeverse poetry. These poems utilize space and indention to create a movement and perhaps a pattern of speaking, lending each woman’s poem individuality not only through her words and experiences, but by the shape of the words on the page, concreting them in some way, giving them due weight. The poems’ titles are simply the name of the respective woman to whom the testimony belongs.  

The Confession is a series of self-confessionals in free verse and prose poetry. The speakers in these poems are at odds with their histories, near and far. There is an element, too, of forced confession from other sources: a patriarchal author, a racist classmate, covetous and pious women.  

Finally, The After is a series of poems shining a light on the after-effects of the war, of a mindset, of an inflicted trauma.