“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

“‘I can’t show you what I refuse to know and can’t save what / I refuse to see,’ writes Youna Kwak in her fierce, brilliant new book. Kwak is prepared to show and save, adept as she is at finding processes by which to bring forth elusive ideas and emotions. Each of the book’s sections seem birthed from a new approach, including truncated prose-like paragraphs that explore likeness and difference in relation to race, class, gender, and family; sinuous sentences that lean on sound, syntax, and humor, where the familial and community roles we choose—or that are chosen for us—are deepened, questioned, resisted, and re-made. The book’s first poem begins, ‘I am preparing to write a book / about the death of the mother.’ I love the unnerving music of Kwak’s poetry, its range, its riveting intelligence, and the ways it hooks an acute consciousness of mortality to the universe’s grand indifference.”—Michele Glazer, author, On Tact, & the Made Up World