Korea continues to grapple with the shared memory of its Japanese and US occupations. The poems in Ordinary Misfortunes incorporate actual testimony about cruelty against vulnerable bodies—including the wianbu, euphemistically known as “comfort women”—as the poet seeks to find places where brutality is overcome through true human connections. Emily Jungmin Yoon asks Why do we write poems amid such violence? What can I, and what can poetry, do? Her response to those tough questions is a sequence of reverberating poems that blend documentary precision with impassioned witness, bringing to bear both scholarship and artistry.

Emily Jungmin Yoon grew up in Korea and Canada. She received a BA at the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in creative writing at New York University. Now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, she serves as poetry editor for The Margins, the journal of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.