Book Review

In her debut poetry collection, Asterism, Ae Hee Lee writes, “The Napa cabbages inside are as wide / as my childish hips—rare in Trujillo, rare like Korean pepper flakes / my mother has been saving by mixing them with aji panca.” Her mother intuitively mixes and matches food and flavors from Peru and Korea. Lee—born in South Korea, raised in Peru, and now living in America—moves through this cultural mixture in her collection published before the current immigration-policy maelstrom. Little within the content of these poems is rooted or fixed. Her poetry, sharp yet unsettled, shifts with energetic purpose while her spatial awareness thrives in play, metaphor, and poetic forms. Nothing remains still; in the collection’s middle, Lee concludes, “There’s no such thing as an immovable object.” There are trips to Chicago, Trujillo, Korea, and Wisconsin (her mom’s visit), as well as poetry involving foods from various locations and cultures. Her attentive poetry echoes a migrant identity that breaks down and reassembles, struggling between fluidity and fixity both in subject and in enacting this tension within the text itself. Lee’s poetry opens up a space where readers, through this poetic stance, can connect more intimately and empathize with a migrant experience as an outsider.

Lee’s language and images are vivid, sensual, and concise, her lines in sublime control of movement. In “Inheritance::Invocation,” for instance, “The rim glistens / copper, the smell of an unfamiliar soil,” or pineapple juices dribble down “the length of our tanned fingers, / down to dot / the sand” in “El Milagro :: Edges.” Her metaphors are especially evocative. In “Mending of Shoes,” for instance, she hears steps on the polished floor in an airport “sounding a mess / of colorful pearls, spinning / off into all directions,” her enjambments empowering this chaotic energy. At sunrise in “Madrugada :: Small Hours,” light enters her living room as “a large jellyfish with the body of an unravelling clementine, passing through.”

There’s also playfulness amid metaphor, as in “Prayer”:

Lord, she pulls me

daily into emerald

lagunas. If I follow her

until the end, will she transmute

my voice into a lacunae

unhushed?

The playful half-rhyme of the more primitive “lagunas” and more abstract “lacunae” underscores this transmutation, this change that emits from Lee. At the end, the ghost of silence (“hushed”) is still present in this voicing (“unhushed”)—such sublime use of language and expression of what this speaker struggles with. Later, “ghost of thick eyelashes / dripping with bitter honey” echoes Lee’s bittersweet struggle to see (and perhaps understand her displacement), the visual equivalent of her verbal struggle, which ultimately reflects her migrant struggle to be at “home” as an outsider.

Lee’s language at times pulls itself apart. In “Self-Study Through Prefixes,” she invokes several prefixes (multi-, inter-, cross-, and trans-) in every other prose stanza. In between these stanzas are observations of hybrid creatures and exclusivity, such as “The Little Mermaid,” where the mermaid/human was both but can be neither afterwards, and Venn diagrams, where “Who fits outside these spaces of meeting? Who can live untouched and alone?” All of the prefix stanzas involve migrants: They are words with parts that together make language whole. The other stanzas speak to the immigrant experience as stifling identity and being restrictive and exclusionary.

The various and sometimes broken poetic forms Lee uses reflect a destabilized language in seemingly continual motion. There’s no one poetic form. Adept at different kinds of poetry, Lee includes free verse, couplets, monostich, prose poems, sijos, bilingual poems, and sonnets. “Bougainvillea :: Papelillos,” one of four poems playing off the sonnet form (via fourteen lines and volta), has no rhyming except the two lines at the end: “above our heads. We wait under the latticed shade, stay / still to understand what it means to sway.” These lines contain the only purpose-driven perfect rhymes in the collection, which makes it all the more to stand out. These effective rhyming words bring out the tension throughout the book: stay (settle) vs. sway (fluid). In this case, the broken sonnet form is ironically partially mended by returning to convention in the last two lines.

In this poetics of breaking down, starting early in this collection, Lee assembles her identity. In “Self-Portrait as Portrait,” she sees herself as mother, I, and sister. Here, the “I” is an amalgamation, “Dearest you, I suspect / we were made tentatively: an exact // assemblage of organs, emotions.”

There’s something more, though, to the self:

Together we are

unhyphenated, indefinite, country

not culture not skin, clumsy

geese of three

wings: one for ourselves, one for the world,

one for strangeness.

There’s such tender control of language, sound, and spatial use. Lee builds into her momentum a layering of complex ambiguity, just as in her unfixed identity as a migrant. The following “units” of three blend into one another and destabilize any textual boundary: 1) “unhyphenated, indefinite, country“—the line break making this three possible; 2) “unhyphenated, indefinite, (country / not culture not skin)” completes the first three; 3) “country / not culture not skin” is a three whose connective tissues are the hard “c” consonance and italicized emphasis of identity-laden words; 4) ” not culture not skin, clumsy” where the connective tissues are the consonance of hard “c” and the line’s unit—implying identity via culture and skin is a “clumsy” or ineffective way to depict identity of the self; and 5) “one for ourselves, one for the world, / one for strangeness,” whose connective tissue in its repetition—”one for”—simultaneously intimates a singularity (as “one”) and connection in all those “ones” together. There’s also the deft, and unexpected, enjambment of the three-winged geese. This identity tends toward the mythical or impossible way of existing, but Lee, as a migrant poet, does exist (obviously). What about the strange geese? They fly and don’t fly. They live on land and water. They are at home in the always-moving air, and they are migratory birds as well. They are an apt symbol for the in-betweenness Lee finds herself living in.

There seems little in this book that strays from being in this fluid, in-between state that signifies her complicated, migrant experiences. To stray, though, may have provided more depth. When Lee returns to her childhood home, for instance, in “El Milagro :: Edges” and visits her childhood friend Alejandra, there are aspects of nostalgia. How does this experience’s scenario of revisiting a childhood home differ for the non-migrant citizen? Perhaps Lee glosses over this possibility and just assumes that the migrant experience is similar to the experience of an adult citizen returning to visit their childhood home. An acknowledgement, however limited, could have been a powerful reminder of Lee’s unique experience as having some even more universal qualities.

Near the collection’s end in “Mercado Central::Marginalia,” Lee discovers and acknowledges the lack of understanding life experience is bidirectional. Her image intersects with a local man from the market. It’s a poem of longing and intersecting stories, hers “a story / at the hem of his story.” At a crucial moment, this man stops his “wheelbarrow / pregnant with chamomile stalks / and flowers” before an image of Christ on a crucifix. After he kisses and leaves smudged fingerprints on the glass, Lee notices his “ashen prints on the dim / reflection of my forehead.” She’s the ghost of his village life and vice versa. “I could say // I understand / longing, but the truth is I know / nothing of his.” This culminating insight accrues with other ones, adding depth to her portrayal of the migrant experience.

Despite the tensions between fixity and fluidity and between a fractured experience and the desire for smooth, unbroken experiences, Lee manages to live and even thrive. She seems most at home in poetry on the page. In “Self-Portrait as Sister,” neither Lee nor her sister are displaced physically or mentally or even in language. Rather, they take refuge, as sacred as a religious act, in what language is and what it offers and expresses outside of it:

. . . . I wish us

the benediction of bell flowers and bees

and beloveds who’ll hum with us sleepy songs.

I wish us here and beyond this poem: here, sister, here.

The play on the sound in “here” is significant: “here” as in the present moment, and “hear” as in listen. At this time, there’s someone else, some other sound, some other connection to be made, and the reader has been able to experience these connections through the accumulative force of Lee’s poetry here.