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.
‘His poems are made from his life with his life; his poems are earned. He dares to be simple. And he is surely among the finest young poets alive.’ – American Poetry Review
‘Li-Young Lee has been praised for his passionate poetry and its deceptively simple style. His poems are unique in their emotional intensity and metaphysical abstraction, particularly at a time when many contemporary American poets are breaking away from the “lyric I” in order to articulate an unstable and plural “I”…Many of his poems recall his father, who is portrayed as strict and tender, powerful and vulnerable, godlike and human.’ – Xiaojing Zhou, Heath Anthology of American Literature
