A successor to Korean feminist poets like Kim Hyesoon, Yi Won frequently writes about the perilousness of maintaining one's human identity in a high-tech, digital environment. In this debut book in English, her poems range from avant-garde prose poems to more lyrical, if dark, free verse, as she examines isolation, death, and the passage of time - and in the process, upends polite society and Korean literary culture.

Winner of the 2015 Donald Hall Prize for PoetryHour of the Ox received the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, selected by Crystal Ann Williams, who called it "a timeless collection written by a poet of exceptional talent and grace, a voice as tough as it is tender." Cancio-Bello examines the multiplicity of distance, wanderlust, and grief at the intersection between filial and cultural responsibility. Desires are sloughed off, replaced by new ones, re-cultivated as mythos. These poems offer a complex and necessary new perspective on the elegiac immigrant song.