Li-Young Lee - Böcker

Combining sensitivity and eloquence with a broad appeal, Li-Young Lee walks in the footsteps of Stanley Kunitz and Billy Collins as one of the United States' most beloved poets. Playful, erotic, at times mysterious, his work describes the immanent value of everyday experience. Straightforward language and simple narratives become gateways to the most powerful formulations of beauty, wisdom, and divine love.

The Undressing is a tonic for spiritual anemia; it attempts to uncover things hidden since the dawn of the world. Short of achieving that end, these mysterious, unassuming poems investigate the human violence and dispossession increasingly prevalent around the world, as well as the horrors the poet grew up with as a child of refugees. Lee draws from disparate sources, including the Old Testament, the Dao De Jing and the music of the Wu Tang Clan. While the ostensive subjects of these layered, impassioned poems are wide-ranging, their driving engine is a burning need to understand our collective human mission.

“The poet of rapture and tenderness” (Major Jackson, American Poets), Li-Young Lee speaks these poems with the intimacy and primacy of a whisper, as if from a lover to a beloved, or a believer to God. Each poem in The Invention of the Darling is a mysterious conjunction of spirit and matter, movement and stillness, the divine and the mundane, the sacred and the forbidden. They yearn for holistic union with The Beloved, every sentence another name for The Beloved, every poem another way to say “I love you.” Forged in awe of life and love, these poems emerge from the unlit depths of our earthly, material desires and our deepest fears of mortality.

A chapbook of new and selected mother poems by celebrated poet Li-Young Lee.I Ask My Mother to Sing contains five decades of poems by the acclaimed Asian-American poet, Li-Young Lee about his own mother and the many meanings of motherhood. This collection follows Lee's entire career, from his debut Rose (BOA, 1986) to his most recent book, The Invention of the Darling (W.W. Norton, 2024). The chapbook also includes seven new and previously unpublished poems. Sample poem: The Inheritance Mother, your hair has fallen for the last time, and I can't raise it up. And I can't put it down. I can't leave it on the ground. The ground is too crowded with the living, too teeming with the dead.I can't store it in the sky. The sky's too full of birds and clouds and airplanes. And the seas are full of mountains and creatures and ships coming and going. And as long as earth turns, all of the seasons are full of days. There's no place to lay your hair down. Sleep won't have it. Your hair whispers too many secrets and stories. Night doesn't want it. There are no stars your hair won't swallow. When you were alive, you gathered it, bound it, and piled it, to balance on the top of your head. A small black urn, it shone. Later, it shone white. But your hair has come undone once and for all time, and what was one now is many. What started at your crown, now has no beginning. What stopped at your waist, now has no end. Now can't be collected or dispersed. Now neither story nor song can comb or weigh. Now has no measure or address. Now can't be counted or left out. And I can't carry it. And I can't put it down.

“The poet of rapture and tenderness” (Major Jackson, American Poets), Li-Young Lee speaks these poems with the intimacy and primacy of a whisper, as if from a lover to a beloved, or a believer to God. Each poem in The Invention of the Darling is a mysterious conjunction of spirit and matter, movement and stillness, the divine and the mundane, the sacred and the forbidden. They yearn for holistic union with The Beloved, every sentence another name for The Beloved, every poem another way to say “I love you”. Forged in awe of life and love, these poems emerge from the unlit depths of our earthly, material desires and our deepest fears of mortality.

Li-Young Lee is a leading American poet, born in Indonesia, whose poetry fuses memory, family, culture and history to explore love, exile, family and mortality. This selection, drawn from three collections and a memoir, shows Lee searching for understanding and for the right language to give form to what is invisible and evanescent.

"It has true spiritual importance for contemporary American literature."--Edward Hirsch Upon its initial publication, acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee's memoir The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995), received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. In lyrical prose, Lee's extraordinary story begins in the 1950s when his parents fled China's political turmoil for Indonesia. Along with many other Chinese members of the population, his family was persecuted under President Sukarno. Falsely accused and charged for crimes against the state, his father spent a year and a half in jail as a political prisoner, half of that time in a leper colony. While his entire family was being transported to a prison colony, they escaped and fled to Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, and back to Hong Kong where his father rose to prominence as an evangelical preacher. Eventually, the family sought asylum in the United States in 1962. When the author was six, they emigrated to a small town in western Pennsylvania where his father became a Presbyterian minister.This reissued edition contains a new foreword by the author and never-before-seen photos of the family from different stages of their journey. Li-Young Lee is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry that have garnered such awards as the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University; the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; the Writer's Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.