Karen An-hwei Lee - Böcker

In Marimo, Mon Amour, an "accidental" bureaucratic data collapse leads to a swift and silent quarantine. Zinger Zingiber—erased from official records—is furloughed from her part-time roles as a dumpling-maker and asylum specialist. Sequestered in her apartment with only her pet moss ball, Marimo, for company, she reflects on isolation, grief, and the slipperiness of memory, bearing witness to a world suspended in time. Her narration blurs the line between dream and reality as she mourns lost connections, interrogates authority, and clings to the beauty of small, ephemeral moments.

“Karen An-hwei Lee’s third book is a beautiful and sustained meditation on the impermanence of humanity’s essential components: memory, spirituality, emotion, thought….Contemplative and linguistically sophisticated,Phyla of Joy is simply exquisite —‘ink and stanza / flow like wind on grass.’” — Rigoberto GonzálezThere’s an undeniable audacity in a poet using the word “joy” in our beleaguered world. In her new book, Karen An-hwei Lee combines scientific precision and an appetite for far-flung vocabularies with a fascination for the sources of rapturous emotion.In poems that roam from the intimacy of prayer to the art of brewing tea, from bamboo-related famine to quasars, the globe’s minor seas, and the nuptial flight of ants, Phyla of Joy reaches toward ecstasy.

“Lee’s strange and gemological arrangements are the measure of her gift. . . .”—from the Foreword by Heather McHughAmbitious and original, Karen An-hwei Lee’s first book-length poem is in the form of an eccentric dictionary.  In Medias Res brings to mind the long poems of Anne Carson, though Lee is less concerned with ironies than with mysteries.  In compressed and oddly slanted “definitions,” ranging from one line, “A paper bird unopened until marriage” (“Comparison”), to longer, parable-like narratives, Lee’s poem moves through the alphabet to limn the border between language and spirit.  Often playful and slyly humorous, In Medias Res is an investigation into how God hides in language.  Karen Lee has made a brilliant entry into poetry.Karen An-hwei Lee lives and teaches on the West Coast. Her chapbook of prose poems, God's One Hundred Promises received the Swan Scythe Press Prize.  A regular contributor to literary journals, she has completed several novellas and poetry collections. Her work has won numerous university awards, fellowships, and residencies, including a fellowship from the Yoshiko Uchida Foundation. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing and a Ph.D. in literature.

“Lee’s strange and gemological arrangements are the measure of her gift. . . .”—from the Foreword by Heather McHughIn the form of an eccentric dictionary, this debut brings to mind the long poems of Anne Carson. In compressed and oddly slanted “definitions,” Lee’s poems move through the alphabet in an attempt to limn the border between language and spirit. In Medias Res is an investigation into how God hides in language.

A collection of visions shared across cyberspace, Souvenirs, a collaboration between authors Andrew Colarusso and Karen An-hwei Lee, celebrates fragments from the literary afterlife. In Souvenirs, a philosophically astute, poetically searing collection of miniature fictions and contemporary fables, objects take on shapes of their own designs creating a composite map to a world populated with little transparent souls and ghost ships in lost bottles; a menagerie of curios; photophores of bioluminescence humming in the depths: light begetting light, deep calling to deep. In these twenty-seven prose gems, it seems that Colarusso and Lee are writing from a single mind as they strike a balance between humor and philosophy; the acute and the everlasting. The ideas they discuss—religion, faith, universality, continuance—are large, but their prose is accessible, and at times outright hilarious. Strange, compelling, and arcane considerations of watches, jade, seaweed, and cake, among many other items, come through with stylistic prowess and earnest, intelligent considerations. Souvenirs adds complexity to the mundane, re-centers the iconic, and gifts the reader with nothing short of astonishment; wonder baked into each delicious slice.