Minor Destructions

MINOR DESTRUCTIONS: POEMS
by Mark Kyungsoo Bias
ISBN 978-1-958652-29-9
eISBN: 978-1-958652-30-5
$16.00 / Paperback / 78 pages / 5.5” x 8.5”
Gaudy Boy, September 2026
Distributed by Asterism and Ingram

Minor Destructions is a poetic testament of faith after loss and grief.

About

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.

Author

Born in Daegu, South Korea, Mark Kyungsoo Bias has been published in AGNI, New England Review, The Adroit Journal, Narrative, The Offing, Hayden Ferry’s Review, PANK, Los Angeles Review, Washington Square Review, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, among other journals. He is also the recipient of scholarships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, Tin House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, and the Asheville Poetry Review.

He has taught at institutions such as the Juniper Institute for Young Writers, Grub Street, and he is the founder of MKB Studios: an online database of creative writing classes with the intent of being financially accessible and logistically convenient. His work has been featured in Literary Hub and Winning Writers, as well as been anthologized in Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, and AGNI’s digital portfolio for Asian Adoptee diaspora. He holds an MA from the College of New Jersey, and an MFA as well as a Graduate Film Certificate from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he was a REAL Fellow. He currently lives in Seoul.

Praise

“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