Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria Sinophone World)

Literature & Fiction

Lee, Karen An-Hwei

History & Criticism

Cambria Press

Rose Is a Verb: Neo-Georgics

Poetry

Slant Books

Duress is a collection of devotional poems for souls in search of spiritual restoration—its contemporary psalms, lamentations, meditations, and praises were composed during the “anthropause” when the world paused. A poetry of resiliency, lyric in pulse and contemplative in spirit, it will encourage and uplift weary hearts of wayfarers in a season of duress.

Duress: A Collection of Poems (Poiema Poetry Series)

Cascade Books

Duress (Poiema Poetry)

A little more than two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Virgil wrote his Georgics, a long poetic sequence about agriculture, suffused with profound reflections on the relationship between humanity, nature, and the divine—and reflecting the political turmoil of his times.\nCalifornia poet Karen An-hwei Lee, inspired by Virgil, has created her own dense, richly-layered collection of “Neo-Georgics,” constituting an extended exploration of such motifs as 
happiness, olive groves, vineyards, soil chemistries, the seacoast, and the birth of trees.\nIn Lee’s contemporary rendering we confront an environment blighted by our carbon footprint; advancements in agricultural technology and genetic engineering; the digital age; fossil fuel transportation; and vanishing bees.\nRose Is a Verb explores the ancient tradition of agrarian labor, including tilling the soil and 
interpreting weather signs and war omens. The poems flash with verbal ingenuity and mind-bending allusions—challenging the heart and mind but repaying slow, careful readings many times over. A meditation on the natural environment, this collection serves as a biomythography of procreation and a reflection on the meaning of happiness.

Slant

God's One Hundred Promises

Religion & Spirituality

Swan Scythe Press

“Lee’s strange and gemological arrangements are the measure of her gift. . . .”—from the Foreword by Heather McHughAmbitious and original, Karen An-hwei Lee’s first book-length poem is in the form of an eccentric dictionary.  In Medias Res brings to mind the long poems of Anne Carson, though Lee is less concerned with ironies than with mysteries.  In compressed and oddly slanted “definitions,” ranging from one line, “A paper bird unopened until marriage” (“Comparison”), to longer, parable-like narratives, Lee’s poem moves through the alphabet to limn the border between language and spirit.  Often playful and slyly humorous, In Medias Res is an investigation into how God hides in language.  Karen Lee has made a brilliant entry into poetry. Karen An-hwei Lee lives and teaches on the West Coast. Her chapbook of prose poems, God's One Hundred Promises received the Swan Scythe Press Prize.  A regular contributor to literary journals, she has completed several novellas and poetry collections. Her work has won numerous university awards, fellowships, and residencies, including a fellowship from the Yoshiko Uchida Foundation. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing and a Ph.D. in literature.

In Medias Res (Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry)

Sarabande Books

“Lee’s strange and gemological arrangements are the measure of her gift. . . .”—from the Foreword by Heather McHugh
In the form of an eccentric dictionary, this debut brings to mind the long poems of Anne Carson. In compressed and oddly slanted “definitions,” Lee’s poems move through the alphabet in an attempt to limn the border between language and spirit. In Medias Res is an investigation into how God hides in language.

In Medias Res: Poems

Review "Some are whimsical, fabulist fictions; others riff on faith and the afterlife. Whatever approach they take, the entries are unexpected and inventive. The stories cut across time, death, and universes." — Foreword Reviews, Starred Review by Camille-Yvette Welsch, March 2022"More than almost any book I could name, Souvenirs possesses the virtue of re-readability. Its stories move so delightfully and surprisingly, and with such curious effects, that they provoke not only a first look but an immediate second. Before too long, I suspect, they will inspire yet another. The truth is that even while I was staring at them, they refused to stay still. I bet they're stirring again right now."— Kevin Brockmeier, The Ghost Variations: 100 Stories\n"Souvenirs puts ancient human questions into insect algorithms and measures distances between us on vector watches: "As we wait for a maelstrom, some angels stir the pool..." Colarusso and Lee are these angels, stirring up language, objects, reflections, and conversations in a delightful, shifting new world." — Kelly Krumrie, prose editor, Denver Quarterly\n"Spectral, liminal, cerebral, Souvenirs is a marvelous prose object, a Rilkean memento vivere of speculative fictions deftly, lyrically depicting worlds of words where subjects are objects, presences are absences, where dreams body and words cloud, all of the above also fantastically vice-versaed. Luminous and tenebrous, equal parts Renee Gladman and Jeff VanderMeer, Souvenirs is a field guide to nowhere, to beyond the deep dark, the end of the beginning, that is, to the untethered imagination. Read it and be unboxed!"— John Madera, Nervosities and Among the Dynamos\n“A mystical archive, at once whimsical and grave, these dark charms conjured by two contemporary Scheherazades, attempting to forestall world's end, and in communion with the saints: Borges, Calvino, and so many others, linger in the mind. Recalled in a variety of registers, these traces—souvenirs of the dissolving world—so hard to hold—haunt and fill us with longing.”— Carole Maso, Mother & Child\n"These twenty-seven pyrocumulonimbus collaborative clouds of Karen An-hwei Lee and Andrew Colarusso move like luminescent, bewildered sea creatures through the "toxic ash" of cyber sea time. They hover like rainwater and clutter our hearts like goose feather. It's a collection born from two amphoral voices. Their union designed to be a "vertical flight" into the unknown and a "rafflesia, the fabulous corpse flower the same height as a little girl."— Vi Khi Nao, A Bell Curve Is a Pregnant Straight Line and The Vegas Dilemma Product Description A collection of visions shared across cyberspace, Souvenirs, a collaboration between authors Andrew Colarusso and Karen An-hwei Lee, celebrates fragments from the literary afterlife. In Souvenirs, a philosophically astute, poetically searing collection of miniature fictions and contemporary fables, objects take on shapes of their own designs creating a composite map to a world populated with little transparent souls and ghost ships in lost bottles; a menagerie of curios; photophores of bioluminescence humming in the depths: light begetting light, deep calling to deep. In these twenty-seven prose gems, it seems that Colarusso and Lee are writing from a single mind as they strike a balance between humor and philosophy; the acute and the everlasting. The ideas they discuss―religion, faith, universality, continuance―are large, but their prose is accessible, and at times outright hilarious. Strange, compelling, and arcane considerations of watches, jade, seaweed, and cake, among many other items, come through with stylistic prowess and earnest, intelligent considerations. Souvenirs adds complexity to the mundane, re-centers the iconic, and gifts the reader with nothing short of astonishment; wonder baked into each delicious slice. Review Starred Review Foreword Reviews: In Andrew Colarusso and Karen An-hwei Lee’s collabo

Souvenirs

Colarusso, Andrew

Literary

Baobab Press

Fiction. California Interest. Asian &amp; Asian American Studies. Who is Kafka-san? Is he a digitally remastered hologram of the famous writer? Or a golem engineered from a finger-bone excavated from a grave in Prague? Or just your garden-variety flesh-and-blood clone? No one is quite sure, least of all K, a Nisei woman hired to be Kafka-san's interpreter and chauffeur through millennial Los Angeles. In resplendent, incandescent prose, Karen An-hwei Lee fashions this short, strange trip out of a mind meld between the Czech fabulist of bureaucracies and a sun-hammered late-empire sprawl. Mary Caponegro says that the "verbal and the sensual are fused under [Lee's] supple pen, and you will marvel at her capacity to animate words, releasing them from habit and predictability into buoyancy." And Norman Lock states that "Lee has written a Waste Land for our time, whose symbolic epicenter is Los Angeles; her novella is, at once, a present dystopia and an uncanny invocation of Kafka, serving time in a penal colony where consumption and its proliferating glossaries have gone mad."

Sonata in K

United States

Ellipsis Press

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Books by Lee, Karen An-Hwei