A cruelty special to our species Poems

"THE CHARGE," THE OPENING SECTION of Emily Jungmin Yoon's arresting debut poetry collection, announces the book's intertwined concerns with assault and obligation. A "charge" is a violent attack, a wartime campaign - and also a duty to report. Retelling the testimonies of the "comfort women" forced into prostitution for the Japanese Imperial Army, Yoon takes up the charge of amplifying the voices of an often-overlooked history. Her central subject, interspersed with poems on domestic and zoological themes, is the plight of 200,000 women, most of them Korean, who were forced to work as sex slaves in occupied territories during World War II. Some were kidnapped, some coerced by threat of harm to their families, others recruited under pretense that a factory or nursing job awaited them: "She is girl. She is gravel. She is grabbed." "Charge Number One" is also, Yoon explains, the brand name of the condom issued to Japanese soldiers in military brothels. The condom "rinsed for reuse" becomes a stand-in for the horror of enduring years of repeated rape by soldiers, 30 to 40 times per day: "Attack and Blast, rinse, attack and blast, repeat." The book fixes attention on the conditions these women faced - injected with the arsenic compound salvarsan, offered anti-hemorrhagic agents made from corpses, left to die of infection. "Charge" becomes, grotesquely, "discharge" - pus from an infant's ears, disintegrated bone from radiation burns, a weapon's firing, release from military service. Not many of the "comfort women" survived the war, but those who did reached an average age of 90. Tapping into the longevity of these voices allows Yoon a retrospective vantage from which to examine the "cruelty special to our species," a phrase that appears midway, in "Bell Theory," and detonates the book's title. That cruelty is rendered most intimately in "Testimonies," in which the accounts of named women are arrayed in past-tense fragments. Yoon uses line breaks and rhythmic pauses to convey dislocation, gaps that leave room for the intransigence of the material, and this formal control lets her frame such images as Kim Yoon-shim's excruciating punishment: "When I ran away the police smashed my hands / weaving a stiff pen between my fingers." Yoon, who was born in Busan, Korea, in 1991, the year the first testimonies were recorded, acknowledges the challenges of this chronological distance when she reflects on her method: "How else / could I write the years / I did not live." In an author's note, she characterizes her poetry as "a space in which I conceive disasters, failures and traumas, lending them my own perspective, dimension and articulation." Articulation itself is key to these poems' power: Yoon reminds us that another capacity special to our species is speech. Humans are unique in having a uvula, "the bell in our throat that rings with laughter." The counterforce to horror in these poems is pronunciation, then translation, often for the benefit of the beloved. Drawing on her experience of "intertwined languages" and the postwar Korean diaspora, Yoon savors homonyms ("apple is apology?") and uncovers figurative language buried in idioms. Definition and translation are intimate acts: "You rise now / whispering murollida, murollida. Meaning, literally, to raise water, / but really meaning to bring water to a boil." Inherited trauma thus becomes a sieve in consciousness that catches and holds scraps of speech, story and image. Even as Yoon examines other forms of fetishization and sexual objectification - registering racist clichés as a New Yorker, for example ("Geisha-Schmeisha") - the poems remain tethered to their foundational history. As foreignness and proximity imply each other in the field of language - "This is the vanishing line. This country, here, there, here" - Yoon's poems transmute suffering into something that can be communicated: "Voice, / a fearful current."

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. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.