What We’re Reading: Li-Young Lee

The City in Which I Love You: Poems by Li-Young Lee (BOA Editions. Ltd, 1990)

I picked up this book at recent Magers & Quinn shopping spree, thanks to a class I took at the Loft earlier this winter on long-form poetry with Meryl DePasquale (a previous instructor of mine and friend). We only read one poem from this collection in that class, but it was enough to prod me to seek out and buy the full book without hesitation. That poem is “The Cleaving,” which teems with the violent, bloody act of butchering — what better way to commemorate Valentine’s Day, right?

Lee was born in Indonesia to Chinese parents in 1957. A couple years later, he fled with his family (including his father, who had been a political prisoner for a year, amidst growing anti-Chinese sentiment in Indonesia at the time) to Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, and finally to America in 1964. The City in Which I Love You was his second book, and received much critical acclaim, including being chosen for the Lamont Poetry Selection (which is now known as the Laughlin Award), which is an award specifically for second books from poets. This collection navigates his childhood and his relationship with his father, as well as the immigrant experience. “The Cleaving” is one of the lengthiest (and final) poems in the collection, and takes a startlingly close look at the immigrant experience, all the while taking place in one setting: a butcher shop.

His poems explore the universal through the lens of his own personal experiences. His work is intellectually retrospective and reflective, and lyrically cerebral. All of these elements are echoed in the long poem “The Cleaving” As the speaker watches a duck being butchered, he uses it as a metaphor for immigration, death, love, sex, and for all things connected, which is especially seen in this excerpt:

The noise the body makes
when the body meets
the soul over the soul’s ocean and penumbra
is the old sound of up-and-down, in-and-out,
a lump of muscle chug-chugging blood
into the ear; a lover’s
heart-shaped tongue;
flesh rocking flesh until flesh comes;
the butcher working
at his block and blade to marry their shapes
by violence and time;
an engine crossing,
re-crossing salt water, hauling
immigrants and the junk
of the poor. These
are the faces I love, the bodies
and scents of bodies
for which I long

The duck, a fish, and these human faces that he examines reoccur throughout, as does the violent cleaving of animal parts and metaphorical bodies. The poem is steaming with fleshy language, and I never lose interest in the over 10 page poem.

The rest of the collection works through heightened poems of love, as well as his father, religion, and more. Each poem bridges, in some way, the personal and cosmic experiences. Even love is tinged with a bit of suffering and often walks hand-in-hand with death in Lee’s work, such as in the poem “Goodnight:”

I no longer hear the apples fall. But how

they go! Incessantly, though
with no noise, no

blunt announcements of their gravity.
See!

There is no bottom to the night, no end
to our descent.

We suffer each other to have each other a while.

I left this collection feeling with a sense of “lead and wings”, as Lee writes it in a section within another longer poem Furious Versions. It’s a reeling, disorienting feeling coming out of this book, as Lee has packed so much into a small collection of poems. But it’s a euphoric dizzy feeling, high from being in the hands of such an expert poet.

What poets leave you reeling at the end of a collection? Which long poems have captured your attention completely? Do you know of a  poet who writes about the universal particularly well?