i cut my tongue on a broken country [Paperback]

A debut poetry collection about reconciling with oneself and learning to love, through a youthful, queer diasporic Korean lens

Lotus flowers, youthful hunger, and other temporary beauties intertwine to tell this coming-of-age story, a set of pulsating poems that move toward a distant memory or a flaming future.

Kyo Lee's intimate debut poetry collection is simultaneously a vulnerable confession and a micro study of macro topics including lineage, family, war, and hope.i cut my tongue on a broken countryexplores the Asian American diaspora, queerness, girlhood, and the relationships between and within them, pushing and pulling on the boundaries of identity and language like a story trying to tell itself.

i cut my tongue on a broken countrydocuments a search for love. It's a eulogy for the things we gave up to get here. It's an ode to tenderness. It blossoms and bleeds in your hands.

Kyo Leeis a queer Korean Canadian high school student living in Waterloo, Ontario. She is the youngest winner of the CBC Poetry Prize and the youngest finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. Her work has appeared inPRISM International,Nimrod,The Forge Literary Magazine, andThis Magazine, among others. She loves summer storms and sweet peaches.

"Here is an urgency that blows me open with a kind of bewildering, immediate intimacy. Kyo Lee somehow reaches into brain and heart and mouth to pull out words her readers wish they'd had the courage to have spoken themselves. There is a poetic nimbleness but also the stone of cultural complexity that is perhaps necessary to know what it means to be a queer Korean diasporic subject. These poems, had they existed before, might have changed the course of so much that has and has not been told. That these poems exist now shake that foundation to its very core.i cut my tonguewill devastate. ló)