Li-Young Lee Criticism
Li-Young Lee stands as a significant voice in contemporary American poetry, renowned for his distinctive blend of multicultural themes and lyrical style. Born in Jakarta in 1957, Lee's early life was profoundly shaped by his family's flight from anti-Chinese sentiment, eventually leading them to the United States. This journey, steeped in displacement and cultural transition, permeates his work with themes of identity, heritage, and familial relationships. Lee's debut collection, Rose (1986), which received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award, sets the stage for his exploration of these motifs, especially his complex relationship with his father, who appears in his poetry with haunting duality, as noted in So Close to the Bone and Review of Rose.
Lee's subsequent work, The City in Which I Love You, recognized by the Academy of American Poets, broadens his exploration of identity within the Chinese diaspora. This collection delves into themes of loss and cultural marginalization, embodying what critics describe as a "verbal and visionary imagination" that offers a historical perspective from the émigré's viewpoint, as highlighted in Sons, Lovers, Immigrant Souls and Culture, Inclusion, Craft. Critics acknowledge Lee's ability to transform personal narratives into universal themes, enriching the tradition of first-person meditative poetry, as discussed in Beyond Lot's Wife.
His autobiographical work, The Winged Seed, continues this journey into themes of identity and exile, expertly weaving personal and historical narratives, as described in A Pair of Poets Remember in Prose. Lee's poetry is also marked by a balance of his dual identity as both a Chinese and an American, and his latest collection, Book of My Nights, reflects on this duality within the context of his Asian roots and American experiences, praised in Book of My Nights.
While debates continue over the influence of his Chinese heritage, critics like Zhou Xiaojing argue that Lee's work transcends singular cultural identity, creating a synthesis of cross-cultural influences, as noted in Inheritance and Invention in Li-Young Lee's Poetry. His contributions continue to resonate widely, drawing comparisons to Walt Whitman while maintaining a distinctive voice that enriches the landscape of confessional poetry.
Contents
- Principal Works
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Lee, Li-Young (Contemporary Literary Criticism)
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So Close to the Bone
(summary)
In the following review, Smock analyzes the style of Rose.
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Review of Rose
(summary)
In the following review, Nobles assesses the themes and imagery of Rose. Winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award, Li-Young Lee's first book, Rose, is an accomplishment and an inspiration. The best poems here are willing to aspire, to be emotional, to risk failure in an attempt to grapple with those large (though too often trivialized) issues: religion, inheritance, love, death, the passage of time.
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Speaking Passions
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Kitchen describes the themes and style of Rose, examining their relationship to the imagery.
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The Documentary of What Is
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Rector examines the lyrical structure and sense of character that mark Rose, comparing Lee's work to Rainer Maria Rilke's.
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Sons, Lovers, Immigrant Souls
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Muske comments on the various literary traditions that inform The City in Which I Love You.
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A Fool's Paradise
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Hamill discusses the themes, styles, and poetic forms of The City in Which I Love You, explicating Lee's meanings.
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Culture, Inclusion, Craft
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Baker assesses the representation of the “foreign” or “other” in The City in Which I Love You.
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Review of The City in Which I Love You
(summary)
In the following review, Knowlton highlights the autobiographical significance of The City in Which I Love You.
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A Multitude of Dreams
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Waniek considers the autobiographical, historical, and emotional implications of The City in Which I Love You.
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A Pair of Poets Remember in Prose
(summary)
In the following excerpt, McQuade describes the lyrical quality of The Winged Seed, underscoring its significance with respect to autobiography.
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Lee's ‘Persimmons’
(summary)
In the following essay, Engles explains the thematic significance of the words “persimmon” and “precision” in “Persimmons.” Li-Young Lee's “Persimmons” presents a second-generation Asian American's quiet analysis of his own experience between two cultures. The adult speaker returns, with gentle persistence throughout, to two words, “persimmon” and “precision,” and by poem's end, these two words resonate with representative significance for a son who has managed to recover specific values from his fading heritage.
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Beyond Lot's Wife: The Immigration Poems of Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, and David Mura
(summary)
In the following essay, Slowik compares and contrasts Lee's treatment of immigrant themes to those of Asian-American poets Garrett Hongo, Marilyn Chin, and David Mura, demonstrating the ways each broadens and complicates the first person, meditative poetry of self-examination that dominates American writing today.
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Book of My Nights
(summary)
In the following review, the critic focuses on questions of origins raised by Book of My Nights. Passionate and profound, Lee's long-awaited 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. The poet's tightly wrought, extraordinarily careful and finally heart-wrenching responses boil down to one ultimate cry: 'Where is his father? Who is his mother?'
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So Close to the Bone
(summary)
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Lee, Li-Young (Poetry Criticism)
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A review of Rose
(summary)
Mitchell names 'tenderness' as the most salient quality of Lee's poetry and judges this a shortcoming in Rose. Lee's first book begins the career of a promising poet, where he recreates 'immedicable woes' about his love for his father, with the dead father entering almost all of these poems like a half-bidden ghost.
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Auditory Imaginations: The Sense of Sound
(summary)
In the following review of The City in Which I Love You, Kitchen extols Lee's 'verbal and visionary imagination.' Li-Young Lee's second book, The City in Which I Love You, is the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. This is a work of remarkable scope—musically as well as thematically—offering a sweeping perspective of history from the viewpoint of the émigré. He speaks for the disenfranchised, but from the particular voice of a late-twentieth-century Chinese-American trying to make sense of both his heritage and his inheritance. Positioning himself as father and son, Chinese and American, exile and citizen, Lee finds himself on the cusp of history; his duty, as he sees it, is to 'tell my human / tale, tell it against / the current of that vaster, that / inhuman telling.'
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Memory's Citizen
(summary)
In the following essay, Greenbaum offers a favorable evaluation of both Rose and The City in Which I Love You.
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Inheritance and Invention in Li-Young Lee's Poetry
(summary)
In the essay below, Zhou contends that "Li-Young Lee's poems enact and embody the processes of poetic innovation and identity invention beyond the boundaries of any single cultural heritage or ethnic identity."
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A review of Rose
(summary)
- Further Reading