“To be mother or not to be mother is what I kept questioning as I read through Youna Kwak’s stunning second poetry collection—how she muddles as well as mothers the seemingly inconsequential question with her fabulist logic and language. Look carefully, and Kwak’s ‘book of the death of the mother’ grows from the messed-up, bloody bed of race, class, gender, and nation. Kwak’s ‘mother’ is not unlike Kim Hyesoon’s ‘mommy’ in that they perpetually mutate and survive, tragically or not, under the same moon, the same shredded tongue, the same global warfare.”—Don Mee Choi, author, DMZ Colony

“The first time I saw Youna Kwak read, she levitated. It must’ve been the force of poetry, the intensity of its expression, lifting her off the floor. Now, a lifetime later, I can see the nature of her gravity more clearly. For This and Other Cruelties casts diamond lights (or nettled shadows) on the poet’s (daughter’s, descendant’s) attempt to disburden herself of the weight of inheritance, and on the casualties, configured here as cruelties, of achieving it. Kwak’s heartbreaking grammar of relations and her antigravity of survival overwhelm me with what I, too, must do to fulfill my familial and poetic obligations.”—Brandon Shimoda, author, The Afterlife is Letting Go
 

“In this stunning collection, Kwak guides her reader toward the deepest levels of empathy and understanding. Fixing her gaze on the two-headed serpent of domesticity and generational trauma, this is a poet in hot pursuit of new forms, new modes of belonging, new horizons of choice. ‘We had none of us chosen our mothers,’ she writes, ‘our cramped apartments, our bullies or fathers, our stupid haircuts, what we ate, what we wore, and yet here we were, doggedly alive, alike as kin . . . pressing obdurately forward toward burnished human form.’”—Rob Schlegel, author, The Lesser Fields