Book of My Nights
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Book of My Nights is the first poetry collection in ten years by one of the world's most acclaimed young poets. In Book of My Nights, Li-Young Lee once again gives us lyrical poetry that fuses memory, family, culture and history. In language as simple and powerful as the human muscle, these poems work individually and as a full-sequence meditation on the vulnerability of humanity.
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Li-Young Lee burst onto the American literary scene with the publication of Rose, winner of the 1986 Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award from The Poetry Society of America. He followed that astonishing book with The City in Which I Love You, which was The Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. Mr. Lee has appeared on National Public Radio a number of times and The Power of the Word, the PBS television series with Bill Moyers. Rose and The City in Which I Love You are in the 19th and 17th printings respectively, making them two of the highest-selling contemporary poetry books in the United States. Moreover, Mr. Lee's poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He currently lives in Chicago.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. 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 The Winged Seed, Lee's American Book Award winning memoir of 1995.) 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 3 a.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."
