![]() The below poem is made up of lines from A Cruelty Special to Our Species in which speakers discuss sexual microaggressions, violence, fetishizations, and trauma in order to destigmatize, defend, or reclaim. The speakers of the contemporary, diasporic poems marry sexuality with revenge-siren-like, they lure the male gaze back into the trauma it created. In a book often examining sex via warfare, the performance of seduction in the contemporary poems takes on a weapon-like quality. ![]() Many of these poems ask how historic violence complicates modern attitudes towards sexuality by examining trauma across generations, nations, and languages. ![]() And the poems in the remaining sections- “The Charge,” “The Confessions,” and “The After”-continue questioning contemporary colonialism, racism, and sexual violence. While the book is rooted in this historic atrocity, in the Author’s Note to the book, Yoon writes that her poetry “does not exist to answer, but rather to continue questioning” (xi). “Testimonies,” the second section of Emily Jungmin Yoon’s A Cruelty Special to Our Species, draws from documentary material from Korean women who were sexually exploited in Japanese-occupied territories during the second World War. ![]()
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