Description
Poetry. Asian American Studies. "Karen An-hwei Lee's third book is a beautiful and sustained meditation on the impermanence of humanity's essential components: memory, spirituality, emotion, thought.... Contemplative and linguistically sophisticated, PHYLA OF JOY is simply exquisite—'ink and stanza / flow like wind on grass.'"—Rigoberto González
There's an undeniable audacity in a poet using the word "joy" in our beleaguered world. In her new book, Karen An-hwei Lee combines scientific precision and an appetite for far-flung vocabularies with a fascination for the sources of rapturous emotion.
In poems that roam from the intimacy of prayer to the art of brewing tea, from bamboo-related famine to quasars, the globe's minor seas, and the nuptial flight of ants, PHYLA OF JOY reaches toward ecstasy.
Author Bio
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of THE MAZE OF TRANSPARENCIES(Ellipsis, 2019) and SONATA IN K (Ellipsis Press, 2017) as well as the poetry books PHYLA OF JOY (Tupelo, 2012), ARDOR (Tupelo, 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande, 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. Lee also wrote two chapbooks, God's One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe, 2002) and What the Sea Earns for a Living (Quaci Press, 2014). A book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria, 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. She currently lives in San Diego. Follow her @karenanhweilee.
Author City: SAN DIEGO, CA USA