asianamlitfans | Sep. 29th, 2011

Ed Bok Lee's Whorled (Coffe House Press, 2011), his second collection of poetry, is a thoughtful exploration of a multiracial and diasporic world.

The subject matter of the poems ranges widely, as suggested by the homonym "world" of the title "whorled." What is particularly fascinating for me is the way that Lee's poems also push this idea of "whorls," or spirals and other patterns that might be created in the relationships people construct with each other in a chaotic and otherwise incomprehensible world. There are no complete answers in Lee's poetry, but there are moments of clarity and possible, though partial, solutions to the craziness of daily life.

The collection begins with a provocatively titled poem, "All Love Is Immigrant":

There is another other
in the other of every

Another

In these scant few lines, we dive into a book where grand, "universal" themes are funneled in to very particularized identities and experiences of immigrants, refugees, and indigenous peoples, and where the specific details of lives are irreducible to broad themes like love. This dynamic contradiction drives the collection's poems and makes for very pleasurable reading.

Lee draws from his experiences as a Korean American growing up in the Midwest, as a native-son-returned-as-stranger to Korea, as a visitor to the former Soviet republics, and as a profoundly observant citizen of the world. His attention to interracial and interethnic contact—sometimes congenial and at other times contentious—is especially interesting, as when the speaker of his poem "John Henry Tran (a.k.a. The Terminator) vs The System" speaks to a Viet at the blackjack table or when the spaker of "Genesis 4.0" describes a Latina girl who observes him at the Midtown Global Market in Minneapolis, Minnesota, curious about this strange "Mexican" sitting alone amidst the international cuisines of the food court.

Some of my favorite poems are the meta-poems, such as "How to Write Then Clone an Ethnic Poem," in which Lee describes cloning cheek cells scraped from your inner cheek and nurturing it.

Love it as a stolen
mirror mists

Or the poem "Poetry Is a Sickness," in which the urge to write poetry becomes an all-consuming sickness, something that controls the poet and forces its words out regardless of authorial intention or desire:

You write not what you want,
but what flaws flower from rust

More than a loss of control, writing poetry also entails a spiralling out of control in the poet's life more broadly; poetry is something that makes a person lose perspective, offend family and friends, and otherwise push the poet to the edge of madness and isolation.

Perhaps the most powerful poem, though, is one that Lee wrote in response to the case of the Hmong American hunter Chai Vang in which he shot and killed a 6 white men out in the forests of Wisconsin. (The full text of "If in America" is available online at an MPR blog.) Listen to Lee's performance of the poem in this video by filmmaker Mark Tang (another Minnesota artist):

Since one of my interests is in exploring Asian-Native contact, this poem is especially intriguing for me. In it, Lee triangulates the difficult situation of Chai Vang—a Hmong man facing off against a gang of white men—such that is is not just an issue of nativist white Americans angry at Asian refugees but also a willful disregard for the longer history of Native American presence on the land. The resonances between the dispossessions faced by Indians and Hmong are telling for the history of America.

Keep an eye out for an interview with Ed Bok Lee in the forthcoming Kartika Review (Issue 10)!