How to Be Her Daughter

Winner of the 2025 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry PrizeHow to Be Her Daughter explores a Korean American daughter's coming of age as she navigates her relationship to her mother, her mother tongue, and her motherland. The poems in this chapbook trace the trajectory of the speaker's linguistic formation, meditating on what it means to use, speak, or possess a first language that never entirely feels like her own. At the same time, Elizabeth Kim grapples with her ambivalence toward fluency in a second language that comes with its own competing set of rules and cultural discourses. Offering glimpses into the everyday circumstances in which a daughter of immigrants must also function as translator, as parent, and as competent adult in order to survive in America, How to Be Her Daughter holds space for affection while also naming resentment, confesses doubt while yearning for belief, and insists on hope in the face of loss.