Winged Seed - Hardcover

Lee, Li-young

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671707086 ISBN 13: 9780671707088

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1995

Synopsis

A personal account by the celebrated Chinese-American poet offers a magical work of memory and myth that recounts a childhood of exile, his father's imprisonment, his discovery of the significance of history, and his search for identity. 25,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Li-Young Lee is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry, his most recent being Behind My Eyes (W.W. Norton, 2008). His earlier collections are Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001); Rose (BOA, 1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University; The City in Which I Love You (BOA, 1991), the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and a memoir entitled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster, 1995), which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Lee's honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 1988 he received the Writer's Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. He is also featured in Katja Esson's documentary, Poetry of Resilience.

Born in 1957 of Chinese parents in Jakarta, Indonesia, Lee learned early about loss and exile. His great grandfather was China's first republican President; and his father, a deeply religious Christian, was physician to Communist leader Mao Tse-Tung. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Lee's parents escaped to Indonesia. In 1959, his father, after spending a year as a political prisoner in President Sukarno's jails, fled Indonesia with his family to escape anti-Chinese sentiment. After a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964.

Through the observation and translation of often unassuming and silent moments, the poetry of Li-Young Lee gives clear voice to the solemn and extraordinary beauty found within humanity. By employing hauntingly lyrical skill and astute poetic awareness, Lee allows silence, sound, form, and spirit to emerge brilliantly onto the page. His poetry reveals a dialogue between the eternal and the temporal, and accentuates the joys and sorrows of family, home, loss, exile, and love. In The City In Which I love You,” the central long poem in his second collection, Li-Young Lee asks, Is prayer, then, the proper attitude / for the mind that longs to be freely blown, / but which gets snagged on the barb / called world, that / tooth-ache, the actual?” Anyone who has seen him read will add that Lee is also one of the finest poetry readers alive.

He lives in Chicago with his wife Donna and their two sons.

From Library Journal

An autobiography at once intimate and sweeping, this work traces the path followed by poet Lee (Rose, BOA Editions, dist. by Consortium, 1986, and The City in Which I Love You, BOA Editions, dist. by Consortium, 1990) and his family. Born into a prominent Chinese family in residence in Jakarta, Lee was shaped by his scholarly father's imprisonment under the virulently anti-Chinese Sukarno; the family odyssey began when they escaped from Indonesia. His father eventually became a preacher in Hong Kong, with his final calling in a church in rust-belt Pennsylvania. Lee interweaves remembrances of incidents from his childhood with dreams, myths, his father's sermons (dimly remembered), and mundane recollections, such as the seeds in his father's coat pocket or the coconut oil in his Indonesian nanny's hair. To the son, the powerful father figure embodied cruelty, Christian kindness, inspiration, deprivation, devotion, and penetrating insight. In this lyrical yet stark rendering of a family of modern China, we see the inner development of the author from his childhood in the 1950s to the present and his adaptation to new world and new perceptions of reality. For general collections.?D.E. Perushek, Univ. of Tennessee Libs., Knoxville
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0671707086
• ISBN 13: 9780671707088
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224