Minor Destructions: Poems

Winner of the 2025 Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize

"Wrought with near-maniacal precision" - Ocean Vuong
"Remarkable" - Peter Gizzi

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, 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.