The Poet Empress
The Poet Empress is Shen Tao's dark, dazzling fantasy debut, set in the crumbling Azalea Dynasty where magic lives inside poetry and women are forbidden to read. To save her starving family, Wei Yin sells herself into a brutal royal house and discovers she can wield the one power the empire worked hardest to keep from her. For readers of She Who Became the Sun and R.F. Kuang.
From the review
Here is the rule that makes The Poet Empress hum. In this empire, magic is poetry, poetry requires literacy, and women are forbidden to read. Stack those three facts on top of each other and you get a power structure that runs on enforced ignorance, a whole civilization built to keep half its people from the one skill that could arm them. Shen Tao never lectures you about any of it. She lets you feel it the first time Wei Yin, who taught herself letters in secret at enormous risk, shapes a handful of stolen words into something that bends the world, and realizes in the same breath that being caught knowing them could get her killed. Worldbuilding as a loaded weapon. I was hooked from that scene forward.
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