For This and Other Cruelties

CALIBA’s 2025 Golden Poppy Book Award Winner, Poetry

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.