Emily Jungmin Yoon
Emily Jungmin Yoon is a poet, translator, editor, and scholar. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco | HarperCollins, 2018), winner of the 2019 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The book was released in Korean as 우리 종족의 특별한 잔인함 (trans. Han Yujoo, Yolimwon 2020). She is also the author of Ordinary Misfortunes, the 2017 winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize by Tupelo Press (selected by Maggie Smith), and the translator and editor of Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets (Tilted Axis, 2019), a chapbook anthology of poems by Korean women writers. Yoon is currently working on a critical manuscript, Enclosed Reading: A Feminist Method for Contemporary Korean and Korean American Women’s Poetry, 1987-2019. In fall 2023, She will join the Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa as an Assistant Professor of Korean literature. Yoon splits her time between Honolulu and South Korea. Source
Between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice, Today
I read a Korean poem
with the line “Today you are the youngest
you will ever be.” Today I am the oldest
I have been. Today we drink
buckwheat tea. Today I have heat
in my apartment. Today I think
about the word chada in Korean.
It means cold. It means to be filled with.
It means to kick. To wear. Today we’re worn.
Today you wear the cold. Your chilled skin.
My heart kicks on my skin. Someone said
winter has broken his windows. The heat inside
and the cold outside sent lightning across glass.
Today my heart wears you like curtains. Today
it fills with you. The window in my room
is full of leaves ready to fall. Chada, you say. It’s tea.
We drink. It is cold outside.
Published:
2018
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2024
Themes:
Memory & The Past
Nature
Literary Devices:
Allusion
an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference
Anaphora
a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences
Dialogue
conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie
Polyptoton
The use of multiple words with the same root in different forms.
Simile
a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”