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The Undressing: Poems
Current price:
$25.95
Publication Date: February 20th, 2018
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN:
9780393065435
Pages:
96
Description
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.
Praise for The Undressing: Poems
Potent and mysterious. . . . [Lee] pivots confidently among registers, speakers, and languages. . . . Countless gorgeous details provide, in poem after poem, distinct delights.
— Dan Chiasson - The New Yorker
Few poets write like Li-Young Lee these days, facing the biggest and broadest questions head on. . . . Fewer still ask these questions so well, and so movingly. . . . Utterly true poetry.
— Craig Morgan Teicher - Los Angeles Times
Immediate, sensual, unrelentingly intense.
— NPR
Erotic. . . . Throughout this multilayered book, [Lee] challenges readers to think and feel more deeply.
— Elizabeth Lund - Washington Post
The poems emerge with their simplicity and complexity intact. In a word, they are heartfelt, without condescension. It’s the triumph of sincerity over authenticity. . . . Lee’s elegance transports us into the aspirations of yearning.
— American Poetry Review
A heart-rending collection of poems that tackle love and violence with equal curiosity.
— Chicago Review of Books
[Lee] presents breath-catching metaphysical equations in incantatory cadences that swing between earth and sky, flesh and holiness. . . . [An] exquisite, enthralling, and ringing call to wind, trees, sea, the beloved, and love, both human and sacred.
— Booklist, starred
