[09/01/26] Bias, Mark Kyungsoo: Minor Destructions

Gaudy Boy, paperback

Publication Date: September 1, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

“[A] rare achievement.”—Ocean Vuong, author, The Emperor of Gladness

“Luminous, intimate, and unafraid.”—Peter Gizzi, author, Fierce Elegy

Selected by Eric Gamalinda as the winner of the 2025 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, Minor Destructions is a poetic testament of faith after loss and grief.

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.