{"title":"Li-Young Lee","description":"\u003cp\u003eLi-Young Lee is the author of four collections of poetry, three from BOA Editions: \u003cem\u003eBook of My Nights\u003c\/em\u003e (2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; \u003cem\u003eThe City in Which I Love You\u003c\/em\u003e (1990), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and \u003cem\u003eRose\u003c\/em\u003e (1986) which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. His other work includes \u003cem\u003eBreaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee\u003c\/em\u003e (BOA, 2006), a collection of twelve interviews with Lee at various stages of his artistic development; and \u003cem\u003eThe Winged Seed: A Remembrance\u003c\/em\u003e (Simon \u0026amp; Schuster, 1995), a memoir which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. A second edition of \u003cem\u003eThe Winged Seed: A Remembrance \u003c\/em\u003ewas published by BOA in 2013 which included a new forward by the author.\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"book-of-my-nights-li-young-lee","title":"Book of My Nights","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWINNER OF THE WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AWARD\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e“Our bodies look solid, but they aren't. We're like a fountain. A fountain of water looks solid, but you can put your fingers right through it. Our bodies look like things, but there's no thingness to them.” Such is the metaphysical preoccupation of Li-Young Lee's long-awaited third volume of poetry, \u003cem\u003eBook of My Nights\u003c\/em\u003e - a collection of 35 lyrical nocturnes which mark a shift in the poet's work towards a more hermetic mode. Where \u003cem\u003eRose\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eThe City in Which I Love You\u003c\/em\u003e confront childhood memories and the generational anxieties attendant to them, Lee surrenders much of his familial obsessing for a transfiguring kind of introspection.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePraise for \u003cem\u003eBook of My Nights\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\"As the title portends, Lee endures sleeplessness to contemplate the self's urge for total presence. And as with the two volumes that precede it, Lee arrives at his revelations through a pliant, twining syntax and an archetypal diction. Nights, those 'black intervals,' become a kind of threshold, a fugitive and elusive place where Lee interrogates himself as in the poem 'From Another Room': 'Who lay down at evening \/ and woke at night \/ a stranger to himself?' In 'Degrees of Blue' the poem yawns open into a dream-like setting: 'At the place in the story \/\/ where a knock at the hull wakes the dreamer \/ and he opens his eyes to find the rowers gone, \/ the boat tied to an empty dock, \/\/ the boy looks up from his book…' Indeed, the stillness and quiet and repetition of 'night' fill \u003cem\u003eBook of My Nights\u003c\/em\u003e with provocative instants of self-transcendence.\" \u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e—Rain Taxi\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\"Passionate and profound, Lee's third collection charts the mid-life ontological crisis of a speaker who 'can't tell what my father said about the sea... from the sea itself,' and finds himself unmoored without that strong male voice. Lee's father was a personal physician to Mao Zedong, who took the family to Jakarta (where Lee was born) in the '50s. As Indonesia began persecuting Chinese citizens and his father was imprisoned, Lee's family left the country, spent five years moving from place to place in Asia, and arrived in the U.S. in 1964. (These events are described in \u003cem\u003eThe Winged Seed\u003c\/em\u003e, Lee's American Book Award-winning memoir [reissued by BOA in 2013].) Lee has ever been concerned with questions of origins, but in the 11 years since the publication of his last collection, memories of childhood answers furnished by father, mother, and siblings now fail to assuage the poet's 3a.m. doubts. Yet he does not trust himself to formulate answers on his own in these 35 nocturnes, and the father seems to be missing or dead. The poet's tightly wrought, extraordinarily careful and finally heart-wrenching responses finally boil down to one ultimate cry: 'Where is his father? Who is his mother?' The complex permutations of these fundamental inquiries and their unsatisfactory answers construct a space in which knowledge and redemption, if never quite attained, always seem possible. Lee is never faced with sheer emptiness; his 'silence thunders,' a vocal presence to which Lee's speaker responds, 'declaring a new circumference\/ even the stars enlarge by crowding down to hear.'\" \u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e—Publishers Weekly\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHeir to All\u003c\/strong\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat I spill in a dream\u003cbr\u003eruns under my door, \u003cbr\u003eahead of my arrival \u003cbr\u003eand the year's wide round,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eto meet me in the color of hills\u003cbr\u003eat dawn, or else collected \u003cbr\u003ein a flower's name \u003cbr\u003eI trace with my finger\u003cbr\u003ein a book. Proving \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eonly this: Listening is the ground\u003cbr\u003ebelow my sleep, \u003cbr\u003ewhere decision is born, and\u003cbr\u003ewhoever's heard the title \u003cbr\u003eautumn knows him by \u003cbr\u003eis heir to all those \u003cbr\u003eunfurnished rooms inside the roses.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BOA Editions, Ltd.","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":9802066053,"sku":"9781929918089","price":12.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":8418218693,"sku":"9781929918072","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0982\/0178\/products\/Book_of_My_Nights_Cover.jpg?v=1527683187"},{"product_id":"the-city-in-which-i-love-you-poems","title":"The City in Which I Love You","description":"\u003ch4\u003eHardcover and signed copies available in limited supply\u003c\/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThrough the observation and translation of often unassuming and silent moments, the poetry of Li-Young Lee gives clear voice to the solemn and extraordinary beauty found within humanity. By employing hauntingly lyrical skill and astute poetic awareness, Lee allows silence, sound, form, and spirit to emerge brilliantly onto the page. His poetry reveals a dialogue between the eternal and the temporal, and accentuates the joys and sorrows of family, home, loss, exile, and love.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn “The City In Which I love You,” the central long poem in his second collection under the same title , Li-Young Lee asks, “Is prayer, then, the proper attitude \/ for the mind that longs to be freely blown, \/ but which gets snagged on the barb \/ called \u003cem\u003eworld\u003c\/em\u003e, that \/ tooth-ache, the actual?”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/em\u003e reviewer Peggy Kaganoff declared that \u003cem\u003eThe City in Which I Love You,\u003c\/em\u003e a remembrance of Lee’s childhood and his father, “weaves a remarkable web of memory from the multifarious fibers of his experience.” Kaganoff added that Lee’s “images are economical yet fluid, and his language is often startling for its brave honesty.” \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e © BOA Editions, Ltd. 1990\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":null,"offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":9802381253,"sku":"9780918526830","price":14.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Paperback (Signed)","offer_id":12467848806481,"sku":"","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Cloth","offer_id":12651872583761,"sku":"","price":150.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0982\/0178\/products\/THE_CITY_IN_WHICH.jpg?v=1527683363"},{"product_id":"rose","title":"Rose","description":"\u003ch5\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSigned copies available in limited supply\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWINNER OF THE DELMORE SCHWARTZ MEMORIAL POETRY AWARD\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003eInfluenced by the classical Chinese poets Li Bo and Tu Fu, Li-Young Lee’s poetry is noted for its use of silence and, according to Alex Lemon in the \u003cem\u003eMinneapolis Star Tribune\u003c\/em\u003e, its “near mysticism” which is nonetheless “fully engaged in life and memory while building and shaping the self from words.” Though at times described as a supremely lyric poet, Lee’s poems often use narrative and personal experience or memories to launch their investigations of the universal, which Lee discussed in an interview with Tina Chang for the Academy of American Poets: “If you rigorously dissect it, you realize that everything is a shape of the totality of causes. What’s another name for the totality of causes? The Cosmos. So everything is a shape of Cosmos or God. It feels like something bigger than me—that I can’t possibly fathom but am embedded in.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In the Foreword to Lee’s debut collection, \u003cem\u003eRose\u003c\/em\u003e, Gerald Stern says that he is “amazed by the large vision, the deep seriousness, and the almost heroic ideal” of Lee’s poetry, adding that it is “reminiscent more of John Keats, Rainer Maria Rilke, and perhaps Theodore Roethke than William Carlos Williams on the one hand or T.S. Eliot on the other.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The rose becomes not something to stare at, but to consume. The rose, which is history, the past, a \"doomed profane flower\" to be adored and destroyed. To be eaten. Like the speaker. I celebrate Li-Young Lee's fine book of poems. I think we are in the presence of a true spirit. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e—Gerald Stern\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e © BOA Editions, Ltd. 1986.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":null,"offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":8419859205,"sku":"9780918526533","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Paperback (Signed)","offer_id":12467821248593,"sku":"","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0982\/0178\/products\/Rose_frontcover.jpg?v=1527683334"},{"product_id":"breaking-the-alabaster-jar-conversations-with-li-young-lee-edited-1","title":"Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee","description":"\u003ch5\u003eSigned copies available in limited quantities\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe interviews with major award-winning poet Li-Young Lee in \u003cem\u003eBreaking the Alabaster Jar\u003c\/em\u003e offer access to the poet's evolving concepts of what it means to be an artist, the way art can lead the reader toward essential metaphysical concerns, and what it means to be a kind of literary mystic in the 21st century. Readers will find Lee's comments on his writing both provocative and engaging. Literary scholar Earl G. Ingersoll collected and edited the interviews, and wrote the insightful introduction. Several interviews appeared in important American journals while others appear here in print for the first time. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The conversations in this collection have special value because Li-Young Lee has never been an academic and has little interest in academic discourse. As these conversations make clear, this is not because he has nothing to add to the contemporary discourse about writing poetry. This collection offers what Lee does best—other than write poems, of course. The conversations allow him to read his poems and talk about the context in which he recalls writing them.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e—Earl G. Ingersoll\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Conversations with Li-Young Lee is the first edited and published collections of interviews given by an Asian-American poet. While the fact that a book happens to be 'a landmark' (in the sense that it attempts to undertake an original endeavor) does not necessarily make it good, I think that this volume of Li-Young Lee's thoughts on poetry, aesthetics, and life is superlative—both in concept and execution.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e—Roger Pao\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e© BOA Editions Ltd. 2006\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BOA Editions, Ltd.","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":8419863621,"sku":"9781929918829","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Paperback (Signed)","offer_id":12462848573521,"sku":"9781929918830","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0982\/0178\/products\/BREAKING_THE_ALABASTER_JAR.jpg?v=1527683189"},{"product_id":"the-winged-seed-a-remembrance","title":"The Winged Seed: A Remembrance","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"short-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #666666;\"\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 14px;\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWith a new Foreword by the author and never-before-seen photographs of the author's family and childhood\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cspan style=\"color: #666666;\"\u003eThis reissuing of acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee's American Book Award-winning memoir tells the harrowing story of the author's early years. In the 1950s, the Lee family was forced to flee China's political turmoil for Indonesia where, in 1957, Li-Young Lee was born. Rather than safe haven, the family, along with many other Chinese members of the population, found themselves persecuted under President Sukarno. Falsely accused and charged for crimes against the state, Li-Young Lee's father spent a year and a half in jail as a political prisoner, half of that time in a leper colony. One stormy night while the entire family was being transported to prison colony, they escaped and began a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, and finally back to Hong Kong where the poet's father rose to prominence as an evangelical preacher. In 1962, they sought asylum in the United States and shortly thereafter emigrated to a small town in western Pennsylvania where Li-Young Lee's father became a minister to an all-white Presbyterian congregation. In finely spun threads of poetic prose, Li-Young Lee carries us through the experiences that informed his four award-winning poetry collections and helped shape the vision of one of America's most celebrated poets.\u003c\/span\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"BOA Editions, Ltd.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":10393980485,"sku":"9781938160042","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0982\/0178\/products\/The_Winged_Seed_Cover.jpg?v=1527683617"},{"product_id":"the-word-from-his-song","title":"The Word from His Song","description":"\u003cp\u003ePrinted in honor of Boa Editions' 40th anniversary in 2016, this exclusive, \u003cstrong\u003elimited edition\u003c\/strong\u003e chapbook features eight new poems by Li-Young Lee, bound together with a beautifully designed letterpress cover. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe chapbook is the eleventh installment in the BOA Pamphlet Series, which began in 1978 and has seen the publication of such poets as Donald Hall, Robert Bly, David Ignatow, Louis Simpson, W.D. Snodgrass, and Lucille Clifton.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e© BOA Editions, Ltd. 2016\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BOA Editions, Ltd.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":17127508933,"sku":"001","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0982\/0178\/products\/image002.jpg?v=1527683618"},{"product_id":"boa-classic-book-bundle","title":"Boa Classic Book Bundle","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWith this one-time purchase you will receive a box of 5 best-selling titles from Boa with a few goodies from the publisher (broadsides, bookmarks, pins, etc.) at a greatly discounted rate.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eThe Boa Classic Book Bundle includes the following paperback collections:\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\n\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003eBlessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000\u003c\/em\u003e by Lucille Clifton\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003eRose\u003c\/em\u003e by Li-Young Lee\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Tiny Journalist\u003c\/em\u003e by Naomi Shihab Nye\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003ethe black maria\u003c\/em\u003e by Aracelis Girmay\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003eWhen I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities\u003c\/em\u003e by Chen Chen \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFor even greater discounts and incentives, check out our annual \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.boaeditions.org\/products\/subscriptions\"\u003eBoa Book Lovers Subscription.\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BOA Editions, Ltd.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47128969281765,"sku":null,"price":70.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0982\/0178\/files\/SpringBundleIG_2.jpg?v=1783707425"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0982\/0178\/collections\/li_young.jpeg?v=1453488122","url":"https:\/\/shop.boaeditions.org\/collections\/li-young-lee.oembed","provider":"Boa Editions","version":"1.0","type":"link"}