Breaking the Alabaster Jar
Conversations with Li-Young Lee
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In the foreword to Li-Young Lee’s first book, Rose (BOA Editions, 1986), Gerald Stern wrote, “What characterizes Li-Young Lee’s poetry is a certain kind of humility, a kind of cunning, a love of plain speech, a search for wisdom and understanding. . . . I think we are in the presence of a true spirit.” Poetry lovers agree! Rose has gone on to sell more than eighty thousand copies, and Li-Young Lee has become one of the country’s most beloved poets.
Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee is a collection of the best dozen interviews given by Li-Young Lee over the past twenty years. From a twenty-nine-year-old poet prodigy to a seasoned veteran in high demand for readings and appearances across the United States and abroad, these interviews capture Li-Young Lee at various stages of his artistic development. He not only discusses his family’s flight from political oppression in China and Indonesia, but how that journey affected his poetry and the engaging, often painful, insights being raised a cultural outsider in America afforded him. Other topics include spirituality (primarily Christianity and Buddhism) and a wide range of aesthetic topics such as literary influences, his own writing practices, the role of formal and informal education in becoming a writer, and his current life as a famous and highly sought-after American poet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This book pairs celebrated Chicago poet Li-Young Lee-whose most recent book, 2001's Book of My Nights, received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America-with a wonderful variety of interviewers, resulting in a delightful series of Q&As. Unfortunately, only three of four excerpts of Lee's work are included; fortunately, the interviews stand on their own nicely. Playing off such interlocutors as PBS's Bill Moyers, fellow poets Anthony Piccione and Stan Sanvel Rubin, and an audience of Indiana University students, Lee emerges not only a serious, accomplished poet with a well-developed sense of aesthetic and philosophy, but also a skilled conversationalist with a warm sense of humor. Whether describing his family's journey from the highest levels of Chinese society to rural America (with a stopover in Indonesia) or explaining the differences between Western and Eastern concepts of past, present, and future, Lee is endlessly fascinating. Knowing Lee's work isn't necessary to enjoy the book, but its exclusion may prove frustrating, as readers will almost certainly want to pick up a few verses before the end.
