I Cut My Tongue on a Broken Country

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 country explores 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 country documents 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.

'Each poem in this compelling book is a beating heart, a prayer, an act of rebellion. There's a tender surprise in every line, every cutting image. In Kyo Lee's hands, words become anything but ordinary; her poems hit the secret bull's eye in our collective psyche.' Susan Musgrave, author of Exculpatory Lilies

'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.' Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.