i cut my tongue on a broken country, Kyo Lee
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025
I’m very taken with the clear and resolute first-person lyrics of Waterloo, Ontario-based Kyo Lee’s full-length poetry debut, i cut my tongue on a broken country (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025), especially given, as her author biography offers, Lee “is the youngest winner of the CBC Poetry Prize and the youngest finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award.” Youth, it would seem, is a featured selling point for this collection, and Lee’s poems offer a reaching, a searching, but one already thick with knowing, speaking a wisdom already gathered along through her years like moss. “Van Gogh did not eat yellow paint to get happiness inside him.” she writes, as part of the poem “can you be a poet & be happy?,” “He ate it to kill himself. / I want to smear paint all over myself / & then fall from the sky. Colourful monsoon. / Art is not because of but in spite of pain. / I want to believe this. / But yesterday I started writing poetry again / & stockpiled single-use razors under my bed.”
The poems are wise and propulsive, and I’m impressed by the clear confidence with which she speaks through all that she is working to figure out, against what she already knows, and works to articulate. “The train back from Seoul. / The world outside is turning green,” the poem “Field Notes from Time” begins, “& time is slowing down. The sun is lower here // & we run west to beat it to its end.” The cover copy for the collection offers that this “intimate debut poetry collection is simultaneously a vulnerable confession and a micro study of macro topics including lineage, family, war, and hope. It 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.” There is an enormous amount of activity running and rushing through this collection, and Lee has a remarkably good handle on it all. These are thoughtful and compelling poems, carefully considered and wonderfully smart and curious, providing intimate confession, lyric gesture, meditation and monologue, and, when required, playful, sassy and savage turns across some complex and even difficult terrain. As Lee writes as part of “out of the blue”: “There are some proverbs in Korean / that i wish to not remember in English.” This is a collection of youth and knowing and swagger and unknowing and wisdom and seeking, of asking questions and searching for answers amid the wreckage. This is an impressive debut by a new voice I look forward very much to hearing more from.
Fucking Ohio
Columbus, Ohio. Fucking Ohio. Fuck its lumbering sky weighing down my shoulders. There’s only two types of weather here: raining & almost raining. That’s why the towels on your clothesline are perpetually wet. Time is forever here & still we have to grow up by tomorrow so why don’t we get all this youth out of our systems. Drown in rainwater & shotgun canned kombucha & die unconventionally & write love poems. i wish dawn might never catch us. i would watch fireflies & listen to you read Siken poems forever. Being young is just a perpetual healing. New liver, same pain & all worth it for the fire. Bite my shoulder, kiss my wound, do it all over again until the dawn finds us, sprawled on the wet grass. Then we’ll bleach the grass stains out of our clothes & hang our yesterdays on the clothesline & relearn perpetuity.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). Oh, and a chapbook is forthcoming soon via Ethel Zine; did I mention that? The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.