Description
Poetry. Asian American Studies. "If SOLAR MAXIMUM's speculative fictions are more concerned with presents than futures, its rigorous calm is deeply disquieted, its systematic clarity vying with diffusion, blindness. Is it a reckoning of human success or error that the cannibalistic clouds over Lee's blanched landscapes are full of weather and information? That they break themselves down as a body and communications must? Why poetry otherwise? These are stunning poems written to haunt a house we're in the process of building or, in another light, gently dismantling."—Douglas Kearney
"A 'great disturbance.' A 'magnetic delivery.' Hold your breath in the bathtub:to 'alter weather patterns.' To belie: a 'longing,' the 'discrepancy,' how the light itself accrues a 'stop-motion' brilliance in the moment, or era, before it arrives. How does the sun 'signal' to citizens and non-citizens below? What is happening? Lee has written a book that melts, freezes, then melts again: a set of 'kinetic potentials.' Both syntax and the animal body leave their residues throughout this work, becoming, in turn, modes of fluorescence, exposure, a way to time the 'solar maximum.' As Lee writes: 'The prints in the ground I track for hours lead me to the place I was taught to call home.' Every page has something on it that was both 'severe instant' or 'coronal flare.' These extraordinary sentences or lines. But at the same time the work feels grounded in a kind of extraordinary praise for the excruciating beauty of planetary life, even as it- as it does—dissolves."—Bhanu Kapil
"…ablaze, abstract, abstruse, aching, acute, aerial, alien, all-encompassing, alluring, apocalyptic, astounding, beautiful, blinding, brave, cathartic, celestial, cerebral, chosen, cosmic, dazzling, defiant, devastating, diagrammatic, direct, divine, eccentric, economical, eerie, electrifying, elegiac, empathic, excruciating, extraordinary, extrasensory, extreme, fair, fierce, fiery, formidable, furious, futuristic, geometric, ghostly, gorgeous, haunting, human, hurt, incantatory, inspired, intense, jolting, just, keen, kneel-worthy, lightninglike, luminescent, lyrical, magnanimous, magnetic, mysterious, necessary, new, numinous, occult, oneiric, painful, peaceful, phenomenal, phosphorescent, posthuman, prehistoric, quantum, questioning, radiant, raw, relentless, reverential, rhapsodic, righteous, searching, severe, shattering, shimmering, shorn, silencing, singular, spellbinding, stark, sublime, telepathic, timeless, trenchant, unforgettable, unapproachable, uncanny, unearthly, unprecedented, visionary, vivid, vulnerable, weird, wild, wondrous, wrought, xenomorphic, yearning, yonder, zenithal…"—Seo-Young Chu
Author Bio
Sueyeun Juliette Lee grew up three miles from the CIA. Her interests include light, human displacements, and imaginations of the future. Her books include That Gorgeous Feeling, Underground National, SOLAR MAXIMUM, and NO COMET, THAT SERPENT IN THE SKY MEANS NOISE, as well as numerous chapbooks. A former Pew Fellow in the Arts for Literature, she's held international residencies in dance, poetry, and video art. She formerly edited Corollary Press, a chapbook series dedicated to innovative multi-ethnic writing, and has published numerous essays and reviews on conceptual writing and contemporary poetry.
Author City: Denver, CO USA