Ko Ko Thett is a poet by choice and a Burmese by chance. Many of the poems in his latest poetry collection The Burden of Being Burmese have appeared in English-language literary magazines worldwide, ranging from "faddish sugar crystals," written in Burmese for Ko Ko Thett's 1996 illegal campus chapbook at the Yangon Institute of Technology, to his autumn 2014 "anxiety attack" at the University of Leuven.