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.

Kyo Lee is 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 in PRISM International, Nimrod, The Forge Literary Magazine, and This Magazine, among others. She loves summer storms and sweet peaches.

Kyo Lee's profile page

Exquisite details permeate this debut collection. We follow a narrator whose worlds and self are fractured and mending. We hear translations, gasps, and "tongue on tender rabbit meat." The narrator is both the lifeless rabbit and the killer, riding trains through dimensions of memory, time, and place. -Leanne Dunic, author of Wet and One and Half of You

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 is an astounding new talent in queer Asian poetry. Her debut collection is a glittering assemblage of poems that slices straight to the bone as Lee dissects love, grief, desire, and the space between the world we live in and the world we long for. Lee's use of language is raw, resonant, and razor sharp, rendering intimate confessional poetry against the backdrop of motifs and themes that evoke the Asian North American diaspora with luminous beauty. Readers will leave i cut my tongue on a broken country as one leaves a dream, with Lee's evocative magic still trailing in their wake. -Kai Cheng Thom, author of a place called No Homeland

i cut my tongue teems with contrast: rebellious energies of electric flights crash into questions about forgiveness and repair. Kyo Lee presents readers with a bewitchingly noir portrait - burning with imagery of drowned cities, archetypal families, lovers, teeth, rabbits, snakes, Korean mosquitos, and holy water. Lee's romantic, hungering speakers are often surprised by their own liminality: "i forgot the weight of my own spine in the water," as memories interrupt with the force of their own pulsing agendas. -Sun Yung Shin, author of The Wet Hex and Unbearable Splendor

Formally inventive, playful, and tender, these poems are resoundingly alive. Not since Susan Musgrave has such a young poet burst onto the scene fully formed, writing heartbreakingly perfect poetry. Lee will continue to astound you with her wisdom, depth of talent, and unflinching eye. -Sarah Tsiang, author of Grappling Hook

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 tongue will devastate. Everything is pulled inside out. -Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.

Absolutely incandescent. Every stanza is a revelation, every line a reverberation. In Kyo Lee's hands, language becomes both a banner and blaze. An astounding debut from an arresting new voice, shot through with rare and dazzling light. I wish I could have grown up with this book, and I am so glad to live in a world where it exists. -Gina Chung, author of Sea Change and Green Frog

i cut my tongue on a broken country weaves heartbreak, sex, malice, temptation, devastation, and defiance into a powerful coming-of-age collection. Deftly moving through languages, landscapes, and time, Kyo Lee builds us a lattice to scale as we navigate Orientalism, familial expectation, loss of religion, and emerging queer identity to carve out new lexicons and a redefined sense of love. -Ellen Chang-Richardson, author of Blood Belies