Whorled - by Ed Bok Lee (Paperback)

About the Book

"These poems are funny, sly, political, and gorgeous. Ed Bok Lee rocks my socks off."--Sherman Alexie

Book Synopsis

"These poems are funny, sly, political, and gorgeous. Ed Bok Lee rocks my socks off."-Sherman Alexie

Review Quotes

Winner of the 2012 American Book Awards

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

"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

"The spirit of Lee's poetry hovers in the paradoxical space between markers of identification and actual identity. He makes wry and rightly skeptical use of the noun cluster and the adjective train, but does so in service to something elusive, something more precious. It's as if he glues together shards of glass to make a bottle only to celebrate what that bottle cannot hold. . . .There's something post-Romantic about this-Lee writes frequently and without irony about love and friendship-but it is not indulgent or salvific. Even at his mooniest, Lee is more than a Matthew Arnold, a figure who cannot help but take the cacophony of the world as a personal insult. If the modern world is a problem, it's a fascinating one, both despite and because of its crimes, both large and small, and Lee does this truth better than justice. . . .Whorled is not a book of clean lines and sharp corners, a book that's also a box. It spills and erupts and makes a mess, but its lists expand and grow, as living things do. . . ."-The Constant Critic

"Whorled enters fearlessly into the chaos of our social, cultural, political, and familial milieu, always with an eye toward finding the beauty among the hard truths of our situations-and fighting for them." -Rain Taxi Review of Books

"In this book, Lee is the writer and traveler of not only distances but of time. His staccato free-verse style is dynamic as ever, better read aloud than in silence, with a greater maturity, and a discernible global perspective. . . . If Ed Bok Lee still carries the sense of being an immigrant, then language-the power of words is Lee's turf, his citizenship. . . . Lee is a prolific and diverse writer."-Korean Quarterly

"Ed Bok Lee's worldview is capacious. His poems seek out startlingly insightful perspectives and stories across the globe and on our very doorsteps. At times unexpectedly, his poems help us see the familiar in new ways and the unfamiliar in profoundly identifiable ways."-Kartika Review

"Whorled is a courageous attempt to portray the intricate human workings at the heart of the dusty underbelly of the American dream. . . . It is a vision of constantly shifting politico-cultural systems where nationality is just one more playing card to keep up your sleeve and even love is "immigrant"-and therefore itinerant, and unsettled. . . . Rather than merely focus on the lack and lapses of "the System" against which the people fight, Ed Bok Lee's Whorled poses the greater and more horrifying question: what if the absence of which we lament comes from within?"-Phati'tude Literary Magazine

"Bao Phi and Ed Bok Lee . . . comprise a local vanguard of Asian American literature, as poetic in their demolishing of stereotypes as they are determined."-Minnesota Monthly, Artists We Love in the Fall 2011 Arts Preview

"All of the rawness of South Minneapolis streets enlivens the page. Lee never shies away from uncovering racial hierarchies, off

About the Author

Ed Bok Lee is the author of Real Karaoke People, winner of a PEN Open Book Award, an Asian American Literary Award (Members' Choice) and a Many Voices Prize. Raised in South Korea, North Dakota and Minnesota, Lee has worked a variety of jobs in over a dozen U.S. states and abroad. He has studied Slavic, East Asian and Central Asian languages and literatures in America, South Korea, Russia and Kazakhstan and earned an MFA from Brown University. A recipient of grants from such foundations as the McKnight, Jerome and National Endowment for the Arts, Lee is an assistant professor at Metropolitan State University.