That cruelty is rendered most intimately in “Testimonies,” in which the accounts of named women are arrayed in past-tense fragments. Yoon uses line breaks and rhythmic pauses to convey dislocation, gaps that leave room for the intransigence of the material, and this formal control lets her frame such images as Kim Yoon-shim’s excruciating punishment: “When I ran away the police smashed my hands / weaving a stiff pen between my fingers.” Yoon, who was born in Busan, Korea, in 1991, the year the first testimonies were recorded, acknowledges the challenges of this chronological distance when she reflects on her method: “How else / could I write the years / I did not live.” In an author’s note, she characterizes her poetry as “a space in which I conceive disasters, failures and traumas, lending them my own perspective, dimension and articulation.”

Articulation itself is key to these poems’ power: Yoon reminds us that another capacity special to our species is speech. Humans are unique in having a uvula, “the bell in our throat that rings with laughter.” The counterforce to horror in these poems is pronunciation, then translation, often for the benefit of the beloved. Drawing on her experience of “intertwined languages” and the postwar Korean diaspora, Yoon savors homonyms (“apple is apology”) and uncovers figurative language buried in idioms. Definition and translation are intimate acts: “You rise now / whispering murollida, murollida. Meaning, literally, to raise water, / but really meaning to bring water to a boil.”

Inherited trauma thus becomes a sieve in consciousness that catches and holds scraps of speech, story and image. Even as Yoon examines other forms of fetishization and sexual objectification — registering racist clichés as a New Yorker, for example (“Geisha-Schmeisha”) — the poems remain tethered to their foundational history. As foreignness and proximity imply each other in the field of language — “This is the vanishing line. This country, here, there, here” — Yoon’s poems transmute suffering into something that can be communicated: “Voice, / a fearful current.”