“Bias is a singular writer whose poems build from an unapologetic, restrained, and dexterous handling of the line. With them he fashions the rare achievement seen in writers decades his senior: deploying the modes of wonder, awe, and estrangement to reimagine ancient ideas of grief, personhood, love and loss, with pristine new light. Quietly bold, deeply considered, and wrought with near-maniacal precision, Minor Destructions is anything but.”—Ocean Vuong, author, The Emperor of Gladness

“Minor Destructions sings with an empowered, clarifying music. Mark Kyungsoo Bias writes in lines that listen as much as they speak, carrying history, adoption, and faith with a supple, exacting grace. These poems move through fracture and silence without haste, trusting rhythm, breath, and image to bear what cannot be resolved. The language is luminous, intimate, and unafraid. The result is a debut of remarkable emotional precision and moral clarity—patient, resonant, and deeply moving. Minor Destructions is a book to return to, one that enlarges our sense of what lyric poetry can bear.”—Peter Gizzi, author, Fierce Elegy

“The heartbreak in Mark Kyungsoo Bias’ stunning debut is quiet and precise, with a large path of totality. Minor Destructions captures the tenuousness of being alive—living despite wishes for oblivion, feelings of being tethered to nowhere. Phantoms populate these halls: parents and birth parents, friends, the loved one’s embrace from ‘way back when,’ a phone, this moment and the next. The revelations in these poems are like clear ice: ‘What is family / if not the word for / breaking apart / together?’ Death looms like a quotidian shadow in every room, and pinning this lyric to the page is a way to pull oneself together, to see oneself and choose life. Bias writes, ‘Even if I could, how do I describe the feeling I get when / we are silent in this room together? / Sometimes it’s not us, but language, that isn’t enough.’ This moving collection is more than enough: it’s tremendous.” —Diana Khoi Nguyen, author, Root Fractures

“This is poetry as heightened sense of awareness—of the smallness of our existence in time, yet also painfully aware that we can only live within that brief moment: and here lies this collection’s magic and its triumph. It is that sense of being fully alive, poetry that makes you feel alive, that makes language feel alive. The poems somehow embrace you, welcoming you into a private world full of absence and longing, but also hope and the constant presence of those who had lived this life before us. This collection is haunting in its sorrow and splendor, the poems the result of a keen awareness of mortality and the joy and peace that ultimately come from it. Here is language that is alive because it continues to surprise us who utter it, alive because we are full of suffering and love, and here is poetry that reminds us that we are not the only ones broken, not the only ones about to be healed: we seek meaning and beauty in how we define ourselves in love, family, country, the world. Indeed, these poems point us past all our sorrow and towards that elusive beauty, and it is there if we want it. These poems have duende, and are nothing short of transcendent.”—Eric Gamalinda, judge’s citation