Minor Destructions
"This is poetry as heightened sense of awareness—of the smallness of our existence in time, yet also painfully aware that we can only live within that brief moment: and here lies this collection’s magic and its triumph. It is that sense of being fully alive, poetry that makes you feel alive, that makes language feel alive […] These poems have duende, and are nothing short of transcendent.”
—Eric Gamalinda, 2025 Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize judge citation
“The language is luminous, intimate, and unafraid. The result is a debut of remarkable emotional precision and moral clarity—patient, resonant, and deeply moving. Minor Destructions is a book to return to, one that enlarges our sense of what lyric poetry can bear.”
—Peter Gizzi, author of Fierce Elegy
"Deploy[s] the modes of wonder, awe, and estrangement to reimagine ancient ideas of grief, personhood, love and loss, with pristine new light. Quietly bold, deeply considered, and wrought with near-maniacal precision, Minor Destructions is anything but."
—Ocean Vuong, author of The Emperor of Gladness
“The heartbreak in Mark Kyungsoo Bias’ stunning debut is quiet and precise, with a large path of totality […] Death looms like a quotidian shadow in every room, and pinning this lyric to the page is a way to pull oneself together, to see oneself and choose life. Bias writes, ‘Sometimes it’s not us, but language, that isn’t enough.’ This moving collection is more than enough: it’s tremendous.”
—Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Ghost of
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Moving between Korea and the United States, Minor Destructions testifies to the fractures of adoption, the intimacies of grief, and, eventually, the recovery of faith. In Mark Kyungsoo Bias’s debut, loss is not an isolated event but an ongoing condition, a residue that stains desire and stifles prayer long after the moment of rupture has passed.
Blending lyric poems, prose passages, and fragments to test what language can hold when inheritance feels unspeakable, the collection insists that meaning is made not through resolution but through what we choose to carry forward. At once intimate and expansive, Minor Destructions is a meditation on how we live with what cannot be repaired—how, despite erasure, silence, and grief, we continue to speak.