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.

From Mitochondrial Night:

We're drumming,
he explained, in the tradition
of shamans,
so the ancestors won't be so lonely.
Because spirits need us
more than we need them.
And for hours
they'll listen to anyone

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About the Author

Ed Bok Lee is the author of Whorled (Coffee House Press) and a recipient of a 2012 American Book Award and the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. Lee is the son of North and South Korean emigrants-his mother originally a refugee from what is now North Korea; his father was raised during the Japanese colonial period and Korean War in what is now South Korea. Lee grew up in South Korea, North Dakota, and Minnesota, and was educated there and on both U.S. coasts, Russia, South Korea, and Kazakhstan. He teaches at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Other honors include the Asian American Literary Award (Members' Choice Award) and a PEN Open Book Award.

Reviews
Winner of the 2012 American Book Award, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN Open Book Award,

"There is a nomadic beauty to Ed Bok Lee's Whorled, which pulses with raw political anger and vital lyricism." -The Guardian

"His poems are alternately devastating and grandstanding, word-drunk and built for speed. . . . There is another other / in the other of every / Another," goes the opening poem, 'All Love Is Immigrant.' It's a beautiful poem charged with a breathtaking idea. Whorled is a book that believes love is like a superior kind of capital: it's a force that flows into new markets, sensing absences, and fills them, whether it's a debased kind of space or an ennobling one."-Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Elias Canetti remarked that a great writer must be for and against everything in the present time. In ways few Americans have attempted, Whorled takes on that challenge, deepening the reader into true soul work, grief and love for our human fragility. In poem after poem, Lee vividly explores knots of intersecting histories that connect the globe's peoples in ways we have yet to take in and imagine." -David Mura

Book Riot, "50 Must-read poetry collections of 2019"
Chicago Review of Books, "The Best New Books of March 2019"

"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." -Publisher's Weekly

"Like mitochondrion, from whence this exhilarating book's title comes, the poet's eye and spirit are ubiquitous, examining and probing the tangled bloodlines of our social and political networks, and the parasitic heft we are exerting on the world's chest. Formally protean and polyphonic, the poems change shapes and registers in a thrilling and often poignant chase after their truth. Ed Bok Lee's Mitochondrial Night is a thrilling book by a gifted poet at the height of his powers." -Khaled Mattawa

"The 'new kind of poetry' Lee forges is wide-ranging and hefty, with long poems knitting together exhaustive description with philosophical assertions while chronicling the past, examining the present and imagining the future." -Star Tribune

"In Mitochondrial Night, Ed Bok Lee takes us on an intimate journey through space and time, introduces us to people and places we have and have not met, to center us in our humblest humanity. Lee is a shaman, he rides with his pen into the vast darkness of our pasts, centers us in our present, and then makes the fearless leap into the imagined, the predestined future. He looks to raise from the dead the spirits of wars lost, wars long forgotten, the wars being waged now, and he does so with a light, lonely hand. This collection is explosive; it shatters the boundaries of self in the service of art." -Kao Kalia Yang

"A thought-provoking collection that dives into the immigrant and refugee experiences of Lee's parents as he envisions his daughter's future. Rooted in reality, the imagistic poems tackle the deep-rooted, long-term effects of colonialism that span generations." -Mpls.St.Paul

"The literary history of travel writing is also full of spectacular and critical turns, thanks to work by Monique Truong, Bani Amor, and Karen Tei Yamashita, among others, that confronts the legacies of empire, decolonizes tourism, and repurposes the genre to gather up communities forcibly split and scattered. Mitochondrial Nightis a dazzling continuation of this project." -Lantern Review Blog

"Lee's work is intuitively strong; the poems are well-crafted into a series of masterpieces that build on each other, creating a larger master work that reveals a world made up of individuals who endure, survive, and connect." -Against the Grain

Praise for Ed Bok Lee

"There is a nomadic beauty to Ed Bok Lee's Whorled, which pulses with raw political anger and vital lyricism." -The Guardian

"These poems work in powerful concert to give body to an entire world of beauty, terror, loss, grief, and joy. The strength and magnetism of Lee's voice come from his mind's profound awareness of a person's embeddedness in a context simultaneously personal and archetypal; social, historical, political, and cosmic." -Li-Young Lee



Book Information
ISBN 9781566895323
Author Ed Bok Lee
Format Paperback
Page Count 88
Imprint Coffee House Press
Publisher Coffee House Press