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10/1/25 6:30 pm
Youna Kwak: For This and Other Cruelties
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Please help First Light Books welcome Youna Kwak to Austin to celebrate the release of her sophomore poetry collection, FOR THIS AND OTHER CRUELTIES.

The event will begin with an author reception from 6:30–7 p.m., followed by a conversation and signing.

Tickets include a copy of the book and a reserved seat. Unreserved seats are available on a first come, first served basis. Free RSVPs are also encouraged.

About the book

The shadow of mothering has never been given a richer, fuller, more debased vision than in Youna Kwak’s FOR THIS AND OTHER CRUELTIES. Kwak casts a cold eye on the splendid and cruel intransigence of maternal paradoxes in all their impossible double binds, monstrous pleasures, and profane mystifications. Shifting between lyric and prose poems, this collection throws slanted light on the ineffability of our deepest attachments, envisioning a world where mother is “a creature whose only enemy could be human.” Kwak brings us face to face with the irreconcilable facts of being mother, mothered, and alive.

“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

About the authors

Youna Kwak is author of sur vie, and has been published in Po&sie, The Los Angeles Review, The Hopkins Review, Chicago Review, The Offing, La Traductière, Oversound, jubilat, Boston Review, and Action, Spectacle. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Youna will be joined in conversation by First Light Member Tawanda Mulalu. Tawanda was born in Gaborone, Botswana. His first book, Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die was selected by Susan Stewart for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and is listed as a best poetry book of 2022 by The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Tawanda’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Lana Turner, Lolwe, The New England Review, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and elsewhere. His writing has been supported by Brooklyn Poets, the Community of Writers, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Tin House Books. Tawanda has also served as a Ledecky Fellow for Harvard Magazine and as the first Diversity and Inclusion Chair of The Harvard Advocate.

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