How to Cast a Beautiful Animal (Poetic Justice Institute)

Winner of the 2024-2025 Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize, an Asian American actress’s journey through landscape, language, and lineageHow to Cast a Beautiful Animal is Diana Keren Lee’s debut full-length poetry collection.Witty, perceptive, and emotionally resonant, these poems accompany a struggling actress from childhood to middle age, from Texas to New York, Los Angeles, and South Korea, while tracing the lives of her working-class immigrant parents and the effects of displacement.Set against the backdrop of the 1980s, when Asian American performers were largely confined to outdated roles, through the present moment and into imagined futures, this book features the layered experience of a second-generation Korean American life that resists stereotype and easy narrative.How to Cast a Beautiful Animal navigates between stage and home, English and Korean, autobiography and invention.Lee examines the loss and recovery of language, the trauma of war and migration, and the shifting