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Family, exile, ethnic violence: all have dominated American poet Li-Young Lee's quietly probing, impressionistic poetry since the publication of his first and widely acclaimed volume, Rose, in 1986. Lee's maternal great-grandfather, the would-be dictator Yuan Shikai, was the first President of the Republic of China, while the poet's father briefly served as Mao's personal physician. The family fled the Chinese civil war for Jakarta - where Lee was born in 1957 - and were forced to move again, in 1959, after his father landed in jail during the course of one of Sukarno's anti...
...After a few years of wandering in Asia, Lee's family settled in Pennsylvania in 1964, and his father became a Presbyterian minister. Behind My Eyes is steeped in Lee's religious upbringing. "I doodled in the church bulletin on Sundays/ while my father offered the twenty-minute Pastor's Prayer," he recalls in "Cuckoo on the Witness Stand." Elsewhere in the poem, he recounts that "I sang in a church choir during one war/ American TV made famous." Lee also likens his own poetry to "a mission," but he's no firebrand proselytizer. His tone throughout this collection...
...Lee's work is lovely and meditative, and the safe haven of Pennsylvania did not mean that the family could forget its troubled past. In several topical poems Lee pitilessly documents restive scenes from his stolen childhood, for him not so much a paradise lost as one never had. "A Hymn to Childhood," addressed either to the reader or to himself in the second person, has soldiers smashing a mother's china, while "you pretended to be dead with your sister in games of rescue and abandonment." The poem "Self-Help for Fellow Refugees" opens with his father being bundled...
...readers whose first encounter with Lee is Behind My Eyes, the echo of previous work is not necessarily a problem, of course. In fact, first-timers will find the collection a beauty. Lee is capable of dystopian quips ("The garden was ruined long before/ we came to make a world of it") and existentialist shrugs ("Every player eventually dies") - but it's the lack of bitterness that makes his best pieces so moving. In "Living with Her" - reminiscent of Matthew Arnold's classic "Dover Beach" - Lee's wife urges him to come away from the window and simply lie down...
...chance. There’s a ceiling and she can never rise above that.” Where’s this ceiling to be found when Syesha’s in the top three while early favorites like Jason Castro, Brooke White, Carly Smithson, Kristy Lee Cook, and Michael Johns watch tonight’s performances from their living rooms...