That cruelty is rendered most intimately in "Testimonies," in which the accounts of named women are arrayed in past-tense fragments. 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. Not many of the "comfort women" survived the war, but those who did reached an average age of 90. "Charge" becomes, grotesquely, "discharge" - pus from an infant's ears, disintegrated bone from radiation burns, a weapon's firing, release from military service.
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. She is grabbed." "Charge Number One" is also, Yoon explains, the brand name of the condom issued to Japanese soldiers in military brothels. 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. 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. 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. A "charge" is a violent attack, a wartime campaign - and also a duty to report. "THE CHARGE," THE OPENING SECTION of Emily Jungmin Yoon's arresting debut poetry collection, announces the book's intertwined concerns with assault and obligation.
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