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Bianca
“I thought I forgave you,” Eugenia Leigh tells the specter of her father in Bianca. “Then I took root and became / someone’s mother.” Leigh’s gripping second collection introduces us to a woman managing marriage, motherhood, and mental illness as her childhood abuse resurfaces in the light of “this honeyed life.” Leigh strives to reconcile the disconnect between her past and her present as she confronts the inherited violence mired in the body’s history. As she “choose[s] to be tender to [her] child—a choice / [her] mangled brain makes each day,” memories arise, asking the mother in her to tend, also, to the girl she once was. Thus, we meet her manic alter ego, whose history becomes the gospel of Bianca: “We all called her Bianca. My fever, my havoc, my tilt.” These poems recover and reconsider Leigh’s girlhood and young adulthood with the added context of PTSD and Bipolar Disorder. They document the labyrinth of a woman breaking free from the cycle of abuse, moving from anger to grief, from self-doubt to self-acceptance. Bianca is ultimately the testimony of one woman’s daily recommitment to this life. To living. “I expected to die much younger than I am now,” Leigh writes, in awe of the strangeness of now, of “every quiet and colossal joy.”
123 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 15, 2023
21 people are currently reading
432 people want to read
About the author
Eugenia Leigh
6 books38 followersEugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of two poetry collections, Bianca (Four Way Books, 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). Poems from Bianca received Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize and have appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic, The Nation, Ploughshares, and the Best of the Net anthology. Her essays have appeared in TIME, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and serves as a Poetry Editor at The Adroit Journal and as the Valentines Editor at Honey Literary.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews
May 14, 2023
“Love should be more mysterious than this. / How else can I explain the decades lived without it?” asks Eugenia Leigh in Bianca, a heartbreaking and heartmaking collection that I already plan on revisiting many times over. With precise and cutting lyricism, formal dexterity, and astonishing tenderness, Leigh’s speaker attempts to interrupt the cycle of violence in her lineage as she navigates motherhood alongside mental illness and the death of her abusive father. Leigh’s poems evoke the way that trauma and grief collapse the distance between the past and present, as well as the strangeness and complexity of living a life you didn’t expect to survive long enough to build. Ultimately, this book celebrates love in its many forms—love of friends, love of family, love of strangers, and eventually, love of the flawed and fragmented self.
May 8, 2023
This is a subtly complex work melding themes of mental illness and fears of abusive behavior being passed on through heredity. The lines feel natural in their lyrically plain authenticity. There are no reaches for grandiose, dramatic language or metaphor (though there are striking linguistic moments to be sure). The plot is dramatic enough. The narrative threads sifted and resifted help a reader puzzle out the chain of childhood and adolescent violent events. What emerges in the third arc of the book is a pathway to understanding the self as a spiritual battlefield. I loved the Biblical references in which I can feel the speaker yearning for and yet resenting salvation. I like the way that many lines can be read by inferring what is not said. An engrossing, multilayered work.
May 23, 2023
“Bianca” is a visceral and vivid collection of poems that reverberate long after being read. The poet’s depictions of mental illness and intergenerational trauma are poignant and heartbreaking but never pitiful. The poet integrates her Korean heritage into these specific contexts, adding to the body of literature that speaks to the Korean-American experience.
May 12, 2023
this collection is a victory. it is as haunting as it is comforting. leigh is incredible
May 5, 2025
Yeah. I think Eugenia Leigh should write a memoir, as some of my favorite sections of this book played on the boundaries between poetry and creative nonfiction. I think the beginning was strong until about halfway, where the quality of the poems began to deteriorate a bit. I’m not sure if I am a fan of the way Leigh utilizes psychological terminology in her poems. It almost feels too clinical and detached at times. She grew up in a life and a world without these categories. So, in her position, it’s understandable to be excited about the DSM. But, as someone who grew up around this language, it felt vapid, and deprived of a punch.
I genuinely wasn’t enjoying the latter half of this book until I read the poem “My Whole Life I Was Trained to Deny Myself”. I think this is a great poem and the best in the collection. I think it should’ve been the finisher, but Leigh went for a soft ending reflecting on the beauty of being loved unconditionally by her husband and how unnatural that can feel because of her enduring emotional wounds.
I disagree with this choice as I believe that this idea was touched upon extensively in the previous poems and could’ve stayed near the beginning and just shy from the end, embodying a linear progression towards the ending, rather than being a collection that resembles more of a circle, a return to what was before. I didn’t want to finish where I started.
All in all, plenty of interesting stuff in here, but most of it is not necessarily my taste. A few poems made this collection go from two stars to three.
I genuinely wasn’t enjoying the latter half of this book until I read the poem “My Whole Life I Was Trained to Deny Myself”. I think this is a great poem and the best in the collection. I think it should’ve been the finisher, but Leigh went for a soft ending reflecting on the beauty of being loved unconditionally by her husband and how unnatural that can feel because of her enduring emotional wounds.
I disagree with this choice as I believe that this idea was touched upon extensively in the previous poems and could’ve stayed near the beginning and just shy from the end, embodying a linear progression towards the ending, rather than being a collection that resembles more of a circle, a return to what was before. I didn’t want to finish where I started.
All in all, plenty of interesting stuff in here, but most of it is not necessarily my taste. A few poems made this collection go from two stars to three.
September 15, 2024
Tell me I am not the thing my child will have to survive.
Do you ever read a book so good that you need to open your laptop at 2 am just to review it? Do you ever read a book so emotionally resonant that it leaves you breathless? Do you ever read a book that has you bookmarking every other poem, taking notes for how to craft something just as raw for when you begin writing, too?
Love should be more mysterious than this. How else can I explain the decades lived without it?
Leigh's writing has left me speechless. I'll let the quotes speak for themselves.
I, too, want to believe my violence isn't all mine.
Even with a miswired, misfiring brain, I did this. I accomplished this. Imagine what I could have done with your brain is a thought that has made Bianca me want to jump off the roof.
And god, even the acknowledgments is amazing:
thank you for your humanity even when I was unbearable.
This is definitely going in my top books of 2024. Thank you so much for sharing this work with the world, Eugenia Leigh.
Do you ever read a book so good that you need to open your laptop at 2 am just to review it? Do you ever read a book so emotionally resonant that it leaves you breathless? Do you ever read a book that has you bookmarking every other poem, taking notes for how to craft something just as raw for when you begin writing, too?
Love should be more mysterious than this. How else can I explain the decades lived without it?
Leigh's writing has left me speechless. I'll let the quotes speak for themselves.
I, too, want to believe my violence isn't all mine.
Even with a miswired, misfiring brain, I did this. I accomplished this. Imagine what I could have done with your brain is a thought that has made
And god, even the acknowledgments is amazing:
thank you for your humanity even when I was unbearable.
This is definitely going in my top books of 2024. Thank you so much for sharing this work with the world, Eugenia Leigh.
March 24, 2023
A collection of poems about motherhood, mental health, identity, abuse, and survival.
from Family Medical History: "How we mimic // the dysfunction modeled for us. / The bone doctor points to a diagram / of legs to explain the ache // in my knees. The brain doctor suggests / I forgive myself. / You were not the abuser, she says. // You are the child."
from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with Secret Knock: "And the hospital // where our mother tells the doctor / a lie to keep them // from taking us away. And the hospital / where, between contractions, // they ask whether I feel safe / at home, safe enough // to take the baby back with me. / And by instinct, I say yes, // but for a second, I am tripped again, / six again, and I am lying."
from June Fourteenth: "My husband once leapt out of a closet / in the dark. To make me laugh. // I wept. No one prepares you for the terrors / of a good man."
from Family Medical History: "How we mimic // the dysfunction modeled for us. / The bone doctor points to a diagram / of legs to explain the ache // in my knees. The brain doctor suggests / I forgive myself. / You were not the abuser, she says. // You are the child."
from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with Secret Knock: "And the hospital // where our mother tells the doctor / a lie to keep them // from taking us away. And the hospital / where, between contractions, // they ask whether I feel safe / at home, safe enough // to take the baby back with me. / And by instinct, I say yes, // but for a second, I am tripped again, / six again, and I am lying."
from June Fourteenth: "My husband once leapt out of a closet / in the dark. To make me laugh. // I wept. No one prepares you for the terrors / of a good man."
April 25, 2023
The most honest, heartfelt, let-me-crack-my-ribcage-open-so-you-can-see-all-the-dark-sinewy-parts-of-me poetry collection I've read in a long time. Not only could I relate so much to this collection, the style was so reminiscent of my own (not to toot my own horn or anything). I love her usage of metaphor, her style that felt stream of consciousness, ambling around connecting dots but always returning to the major theme at hand by the end. Her imagery and language are so precise and bold, dream-like and abstract, yet never becoming inaccessible to the reader. While everyone's experiences with PTSD and bi-polar disorder are different, I felt that Eugenia was so able to convey the compulsions of a traumatized mind, the fears of how you will treat others because of your trauma, and the hopelessness of feeling trapped and hating your own brain. I adored this collection and I know I will return to it again and again.
February 26, 2023
This book hit me like a bolt of lightning. By page five I was crying at lines like "The distance between [my son] alive and him dead is how well I am." Bianca is Leigh's youthful alter ego, the name she gave the poorly behaved version of herself prior to receiving diagnoses of Bipolar Disorder II and Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The poems and essay in this collection describe mental illness better than the DSM ever could ("Which came first? Everything falling apart or the feeling of everything falling apart?"), but they transcend pathology. Leigh also weaves in intergenerational trauma, the Korean concept of han, and much about motherhood. They're all irrevocably connected, of course; that's the thing. My own struggles are a different flavor, but I have CPTSD and a baby I'm always scared for, and this book felt like a lifeline.
August 27, 2023
Sealey book 26.
Oh WOW. I think I heard about this collection in Jon Sands Emotional Historians workshop and immediately put it on hold pre-release. It’s INTENSE. Basically every mental health, child abuse, and self-harm trigger warning there is. The fact that it’s all autobiographical (Bianca is Leigh’s other (bipolar) self) is a total knife to the heart. I’m so glad she’s… finding a way out? Maintaining a contract to live? I’m not sure how to phrase it but could easily imagine this being a book left behind rather than the book of a living author and I’m so glad it’s the latter and not the former. It’s a very compelling, very fast ride and in some ways just feels like one long poem (section II really is just one long poem). But two that stood out to me were “How the Dung Beetle Finds Its Way Home” and “To the Self Who, Twelve Years Ago, Wrote a Letter to Me.”
Oh WOW. I think I heard about this collection in Jon Sands Emotional Historians workshop and immediately put it on hold pre-release. It’s INTENSE. Basically every mental health, child abuse, and self-harm trigger warning there is. The fact that it’s all autobiographical (Bianca is Leigh’s other (bipolar) self) is a total knife to the heart. I’m so glad she’s… finding a way out? Maintaining a contract to live? I’m not sure how to phrase it but could easily imagine this being a book left behind rather than the book of a living author and I’m so glad it’s the latter and not the former. It’s a very compelling, very fast ride and in some ways just feels like one long poem (section II really is just one long poem). But two that stood out to me were “How the Dung Beetle Finds Its Way Home” and “To the Self Who, Twelve Years Ago, Wrote a Letter to Me.”
October 2, 2023
A collection that navigates what it is to be a mother and a wife while navigating mental illness and a traumatic childhood — and reclaiming oneself amidst all of that. Filled with both violence and grace, anger and beauty, longing and forgiveness, this collection is not about easy redemptions, but still, is filled with hope, despite it all. Each poem hits with a gut punch, and even though I don't have the same history, I could keenly relate to the poems about motherhood. My favorite poems (though very hard to choose!) are "The First Leaf", "How the Dung Beetle Finds Its Way Home", "My Whole Life I Was Trained to Deny Myself", "Gold", "Family Medical History", and the ending poem "My Husband Tells Me about a Man Who Doesn't Kill Himself." But also very much, I love the prose poem/essay "The Part of Stories One Never Quite Believes".
October 27, 2023
I’m not crying you are!!
Seriously tho, when I saw Traci Brimhall blurbed this collection, I knew I was in trouble.
This collection hurt so goddamn much. The author talks so candidly about the abuse she survived, the feelings regarding when the person who is supposed to protect you is the one hurting you, hating your broken brain, dealing with finding love despite yourself and your own sabotage. I cried at the very beginning and the very end.
This is not a collection to speed through. The author exposed their insides so thoroughly that I couldn’t read more than 3 poems in one sitting. It was raw and unflinching.
Seriously tho, when I saw Traci Brimhall blurbed this collection, I knew I was in trouble.
This collection hurt so goddamn much. The author talks so candidly about the abuse she survived, the feelings regarding when the person who is supposed to protect you is the one hurting you, hating your broken brain, dealing with finding love despite yourself and your own sabotage. I cried at the very beginning and the very end.
This is not a collection to speed through. The author exposed their insides so thoroughly that I couldn’t read more than 3 poems in one sitting. It was raw and unflinching.
January 23, 2024
we all need to thank eugenia leigh for how candidly she lets us readers in to the horrors and healing of her journey with familial relationships, bipolar disorder, and ptsd. these poems are not flowery — they are painfully honest in a way that was new to me + made me want to look away. to me, “bianca” sits in the company of stephanie foo’s “what my bones know” and dr jenny wang’s “permission to come home” (aka mental health books by asian american women that have fully changed how i exist in the world).
if nothing else, read this book for the piece “my whole life i was trained to deny myself” which is exactly as devastating as it sounds.
if nothing else, read this book for the piece “my whole life i was trained to deny myself” which is exactly as devastating as it sounds.
February 24, 2023
This collection is a remarkable outpouring of both strength and weakness, while exploring the narrator's suffering and (possibly) overcoming. It's a rough ride at times. The entire collection could come with content warnings for childhood abuse, mental illness, and suicidal thoughts. Leigh navigates the horrors described with depth and style, turning a world of ugliness into a work of art that is, in all respects, beautiful. I highly recommend this book, but be prepared for the monsters that lurk inside.
April 22, 2023
From couplets to prose blocks to zuihitsu, Leigh proves her range through this collection. I felt pain and passion through breathtaking language. My favorite part was III, which I should've known from the stunning epigraph by Rainer Maria Rilke: "It's here in all the piece of my shame that now I find myself again." A major theme is bipolar disorder, which is explored from emotional and more technical perspectives. A brilliant collection that made my heart ache and mouth open.
May 11, 2023
Some of these poems feel like they are being spoken by a woman on fire. Others have a clarity that feels tender or terrible, or maybe both. Poems about childhood domestic abuse, about bipolar disorder, and, eventually, about grace, though perhaps “about” is a less appropriate preposition than “within” or “through.” Not an easy read, I think, but one that is rewarding, as the poems chart a life’s path—and not a linear one—between survival and living.
October 7, 2023
What a glorious collection of psalmic rage, sadness, and hope. I’ve never seen such an incredible use of Biblical imagery and language.
The triumph of this book is that Eugenia Leigh never attempts to contort her pain and trauma into art. In doing so, she avoids invoking any of the tropes readers might expect—this is singularly her story, and it feels like such a privilege to be able to spend time with her voice.
I will revisit this collection for years to come.
The triumph of this book is that Eugenia Leigh never attempts to contort her pain and trauma into art. In doing so, she avoids invoking any of the tropes readers might expect—this is singularly her story, and it feels like such a privilege to be able to spend time with her voice.
I will revisit this collection for years to come.
April 26, 2023
A stunning and spellbinding collection that unpacks so much with such lyric precision: bipolar disorder, trauma, motherhood. I had to stop reading at points because I became so emotionally overwhelmed, which to me is a clear sign that a poet has succeeded in connecting with their readers. A triumph.
September 27, 2024
Once I sat down to read this I had to finish it all at once. What a marvel. The polyvocal quality of the poems, the way they speak to one another across the collection, the mastery of enjambment, the symbols and allusions -- there is so much to technically praise here. It also cut emotionally right to my core, so I know this is some amazing poetry.
May 8, 2023
a poetry collection that truly clutched my heart as it started to come together as you read along in its search for answers, for healing, and the way we must destigmatize mental illness as it touches us all one way or another ❤️🩹
June 6, 2023
Navigates the complexity of still loving an abusive parent but hoping you end up nothing like them, while also being informative on illness’ like PTSD and Bipolar Disorder and their genetic and environmental components. So, it was great good wonderful yes wow
January 11, 2024
i haven't been able to "write" mental illness in some time, but sitting alongside eugenia leigh's bianca i am lining the contours of one of my own (though she goes by different names) for the first time in months. this book is very easy to love.
May 27, 2024
I read this in two sittings, could easily have done it in one. Impossible to put down, heartbreaking but hopeful, crazy energy. Quite a portrayal of the ups and downs through which one lives as a person with a severe mental health disorder. Also the struggles of new motherhood. Highly recommended.
June 27, 2024
4.5 stars - this is by far one of the best poetry collections i have ever read. i found myself bawling my eyes out while reading her poems. the honesty and vulnerability shown in this collection is astounding, mixed with her poetic prowess.
July 23, 2024
Poetry is one of my least favorite writing styles, so I struggled to find a book in this category for a reading challenge I'm doing that I felt I could potentially enjoy. This book was a quick read and I didn't hate it.
December 9, 2025
I support Asian-American work. This was complex and I'm not sure I fully understood everything, but the poems will stay with me for awhile afterwards. Themes of childhood abuse and trauma, mental illness, motherhood. Quite heavy and not for the faint of heart.
March 23, 2023
This set me on fire (I mean that as a compliment). BRB going to go read it again immediately.
April 9, 2023
Poems about mental illness and family dynamics beautifully crafted. Have never trusted a voice from the page like I do Eugenia Leigh's.
April 25, 2023
Saved many poems to re-read again as I process my own parents and my own traumas.
April 28, 2023
Life changing and brilliant. One of the most powerful poetry collections I have ever read.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews