How to Cast a Beautiful Animal

Winner of the 2024–2025 Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize, an Asian American actress’s journey through landscape, language, and lineage

How 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 Set against the backdrop of the 1980s, when Asian American performers were largely confined to outdated roles, through the present moment and into imagined futures, this book features the layered experience of a second-generation Korean American life that resists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 terrains of relationships, labor, and art. From the financial crises of the early twenty-first century to moments of joy and creative discovery, this collection balances sharp social observation with lyric intimacy.

Using a wide range of styles and forms, Lee moves beyond immigrant tragedy and the model minority myth to create a multifaceted portrait of family, American dream versus reality, humor, and resilience. With a lens both sweeping and precise, these poems consider the limits, and possibilities, of language while honoring lives and histories often relegated to the margins. How to Cast a Beautiful Animal marks the arrival of a distinctive and compelling new voice in contemporary American poetry.