Name: The Undressing
ISBN: 9780393065435

Li-Young Lee

Celebrated poet Li-Young Lee returns with a breathtaking new volume about the violence of desire and the peace of love.

Poems

The Undressing

cee 

sage lynn

A boy becomes a young man in an instant / But not before he learns to say yes to life / is to say yes to death. / To say no to death / is to say no to living.

A young man becomes an old man even quicker. / But not before he gives up life / and death, yes and no.

from “reading, counting, playing alone”

You’d think many deaths early in life, / you’d think having to be silent and still in his father’s arms when / carried away for good / from his native city littered with corpses, / would have taught this young one how to count / the uncountable, / how to hold the immeasurably heavy / in two hands when observing / falling bodies lit to rest in ceremonial rooms. / But watch him with his ball. / He’s still learning. / He doesn’t number his throws, rather / only what falls into his hands.

Don’t say that, she says. / We see by the light of who we are. / Look at us: You inside me / inside you. We’ve lived inside / each other from the beginning. / And from before the beginning. / Before the world was ever found.

azliana aziz

a decade and you can see how he changed course in incorporating his personal experience in his poems. less autobiographical, more subtle and broad. his gorgeous lyrical prose and burning imagination still stands.

B. K.

I'm not usually someone who can pinpoint my feelings about a book down to quarter-stars, but this is like 2.75 stars. I thought most of these poems were just okay, but there were certain lines and stanzas I really liked. I might check out a different collection of Li-Young Lee's work in the future.

Celebrated poet Li-Young Lee returns with a breathtaking new volume about the violence of desire and the peace of love. The Undressing is a tonic for spiritual anemia; it attempts to uncover things hidden since the dawn of the world. Short of achieving that end, these mysterious, unassuming poems investigate the human violence and dispossession increasingly prevalent around the world, as well as the horrors the poet grew up with as a child of refugees. Lee draws from disparate sources, including the Old Testament, the Dao De Jing, and the music of the Wu Tang Clan. While the ostensive subjects of these layered, impassioned poems are wide-ranging, their driving engine is a burning need to understand our collective human mission.

The Undressing Poems