Mitochondrial Night
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Poems that trace paths through time, genealogy, and geography, locating the generational legacy of history.
Taking mitochondrial DNA as his guide, Lee explores familial and national legacies, and their persistence across shifting boundaries and the erosions of time. In these poems, the trait of an ancestor appears in the face of a newborn, and in her cry generations of women's voices echo. Stories, both benign and traumatic, travel as lore and DNA. Using lush, exact imagery, whether about the corner bar or a hilltop in Korea, Lee is a careful observer, tracking and documenting the way that seemingly small moments can lead to larger insights.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The third book from Lee (Whorled) is best described using his own lines: "primitive and futuristic:/ part wood, grass, plastic/ castle, spaceship, cocoon, and cathedral/ of double helixes." Winner of an American Book Award and a PEN/Open Book Award, Lee strikes a dizzying balance between the organic and the cosmic, the intimate and mythological. In these poems, time collapses to address historic events that influence the now and the yet-to-come. In "Ultrasound," the speaker likens his unborn daughter to a photograph of his "unborn/ father's newlywed parents// decades before the war./ In a black suit and silk hanbok,/ light pink or perhaps pale blue,// their adolescent faces float,/ grainy as all unresolved fates." For Lee, "each body is an ark" spanning time periods and the inherited cells of whole communities that make up one's lineage. These interconnections come through in language itself as Lee translates the words of his mother "from the man's Spanish-accented, broken Russian on the Seoul-based news show's translation into Korean that she'd watched." Nothing is ever set, or as Lee writes, "Nothing alive snug in its name. Even art like a great cargo ship veering/ starboard midsea has at some indeterminate point in the night/ become inverted and backward."
