"With searing witness and quietly prodigious song here is a volume that speaks sharp truths to those who would wish the forgetting of one of the darkest hours of humanity. A lovely, moving, and ultimately devastating book." -- Chang-rae Lee

"Emily Jungmin Yoon finds language to convey its horror and violence--painfully and unsparingly, but somehow also with a delicacy, precision, and attention that does not impose the true (literal) brutality on the reader, which makes these poems all the more shocking and unforgettable." -- Amy Tan

"Emily Jungmin Yoon's...un-erring lyrical sense, evident in all her poems, including these meditations on slavery and rape, allow her to transcend the limits of language itself. From her refusal of dismissive epiphany to the profound linguistic insights that underscore these rare searching poems, beauty occurs." -- Carol Muske-Dukes

"[A] deeply reverent debut collection. . . [Yoon] writes these poems in her second language, an English in which she takes mindful, absorbing residence while her 'native tongue is a code' that orchestrates with brimming precision what can be imagined, mourned, remembered, invented and haunted." -- Eleanor Chai

"The poems...are miracles of clarity and precision that are all the more miraculous because their strength, piercing lyricism, and transparent humanity never quaver or falter or step back for a second." -- Vijay Seshadri

"A heart-wrenching debut...Yoon's work is compelling in part because it shows the importance of understanding history and its enduring impact." -- Washington Post