Craig Morgan Teicher Reviews Li-Young Lee's Newest Collection, The Undressing
For the LA Times, Craig Morgan Teicher reviews Li-Young Lee's fifth collection of poems, The Undressing (W.W. Norton, 2018). Teicher notes that, "[a]t his best, Lee is capable of enormous sensuality, of blurring the lines completely between the words and the things they refer to." Furthermore:
This blurring, a kind of translation between real and imaginary spheres, enacts one of the central questions of Lee's poetry. Things get very sexy indeed on the way to answering it: "The smell of her foot / makes me think of saddles. / I lick her instep. I kiss her toes. I kiss her ankle."
But, of course, there is no answer, otherwise why write poetry rather than nonfiction. Lee calls language, which, in his parlance stands, sometimes, for God, "the true blank" — it is always hiding what it purports to explain.
And so the words he uses in an attempt to fathom his own origins — he was a child refugee, the son of Mao Zedong's former personal physician who went into exile — are equally slippery, awkward footholds on "that ancient peak / called Father's Heart":
Soldiers with guns are at our door again.
Sister, quick. Change into a penny.
I'll fold you in a handkerchief,
put you in my pocket,
and jump inside a sack of rice,
one of the uncooked kernels.
The imagination here attempts to transform the traumas of memory into something palatable, into something bearable. This is another of the main purposes of poetry: to make experience visible if not comprehensible or less painful.
Read the full review at the LA Times.