Karen An-hwei Lee
Personal Information
Description
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008), In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), and a chapbook, God’s One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe Press, 2002). Lee has worked as a florist’s assistant, mended books in a rare-book archive, grown tissue cultures in a medical lab, and taught music lessons in the field of music therapy for mental health patients. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, she lives and teaches on the West Coast, where she is a novice harpist.
Books
Ardor
Janine Canan's most recent book of poetry, Ardor: poems of life, dedicated to the spiritual leader, Amma, is vast in scope and courageous in its numerous referrals to God as the source of inspiration and creation. Her poems are spiritually delightful, naturally delectable, didactic, and very dear. Poet and psychiatrist, Janine Canan, has spent her life in an exhaustive pursuit of truth and beauty. Now, in her final stage of life, she who followed the path of a humble seeker, is finding. And what she encounters she generously shares with us through poems that offer broad panoramas of enlightenment along with moral lessons and pure moments of ecstasy. The 250-page collection is divided into eight sections: Meetings with God, Tears for the World, Indestructible Woman, Suffering Arrives, Teachers Everywhere, Singing to the Stars, and River of Life. Some poems explore the exquisite beauty of the natural world and the indivisible bond between humans and nature. Others are brief proverbs. Some express sorrow at the degradation of Mother Earth by insensitive beings. Others, her love poems, offer spiritual union as the ultimate form of ecstasy. Without doubt, Janine Canan uses poetry to share what she has experienced--the wonderful, painful, ecstatic and contemplative aspects of life. And, it is quite apparent, her current vision is acquired through God's eyes.
In medias res
"Karen An-hwei Lee's book 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, parablelike narratives, Lee's poems move through the alphabet in an attempt to limn the border between language and spirit. Often playful and slyly humorous, In Media Res is an investigation into how God hides in language."--BOOK JACKET.