EBOOK
About
Abode is a debut collection of interconnected poems that delve with vertiginous momentum into homes-both material and interior-lost and rediscovered from the inside looking in: they are excavations of nested domestic spheres furnished with the bricolage of ruin and decay. Lee takes readers through hallucinatory geographies, plant-haunted spaces, and dreamlike corridors flooded with water and light, accompanied by an ever-changing subject that cannot make itself feel at home in its body, its country, or its language.
Abode is a debut collection of interconnected prose and free verse poems by Jun-long Lee that delve with vertiginous momentum into homes lost and rediscovered from the inside looking in. Lee takes readers down dreamlike corridors accompanied by an ever-changing subject that cannot make itself feel at home in its body, its country, or its language.
Jun-long Lee's Abode surprises. In it, we read the visible not only with the eyes, but with a grabbling in vegetal worlds replete with smells and sound. Here flesh/leaf/soil are one, and Lee's poems are dark organismic speech arising from a multitudinous off-kilter of shared being. They may at first seem post-apocalyptic, but a patient reading's slow absorption torques the head to receive their healing touch. The pronouns of these poems are you, I, we, they. As if in echo of Martin Buber's I/Thou, their ooze of mud and membrane intensively multiplies and emerges reveals a molecularity in plant and human. A texturity: maturity, futurity, mutuality, texture. Home as forest floor.
-Erín Moure, author of Theophylline: A Poetic Migration "No one disappears alone-" these linked poems are a pastoral freak-out of the repercussions of a morally tainted language lineage. Halfbelonging, wordnulled, nothingshaped: the human spore, "to people nearby worlds," comes across as "slightly rotten fruits that would disappear faster than I could forget them." Yet, with foresight and empathy, Jun-long Lee's renewed commitment to this one solitary abode is within our reach.
-Weyman Chan, author of Witness Back at Me Art is our attempt to distill the immortal from what is born, grows, and passes away. In this it is like faith, and the poem, a prayer to a constant. Jun-long Lee gives us the world from the other side of our longing for the eternal; his poetry relishes the infirmity of things, the realization that all boundaries are melting edges. It is praise for the invisibleunchanging (to borrow from Lee's enactment of his poetic vision with two words and rejected spacebar). The pleasure of reading Abode is like that of eating the pear ripening in the bowl at just the right time.
-Richard Harrison, author of On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood Something has happened to the world as we know it. We can no longer name the places where we once felt at home. We are no longer ourselves, even if some of us still have hair and nails. Beings slip into caves and under rotten leaves, find hidden nooks in which to breathe and shudder. Through Jun-long Lee's unsettlingly lively series of poems, something new and potent is coming into being. I don't know what it is and neither do you, but we will recognize it because we'll have to. This book is a feathered and fleshy dream, so close it is almost but not quite human.
-Larissa Lai, author of The Tiger Flu
Abode is a debut collection of interconnected prose and free verse poems by Jun-long Lee that delve with vertiginous momentum into homes lost and rediscovered from the inside looking in. Lee takes readers down dreamlike corridors accompanied by an ever-changing subject that cannot make itself feel at home in its body, its country, or its language.
Jun-long Lee's Abode surprises. In it, we read the visible not only with the eyes, but with a grabbling in vegetal worlds replete with smells and sound. Here flesh/leaf/soil are one, and Lee's poems are dark organismic speech arising from a multitudinous off-kilter of shared being. They may at first seem post-apocalyptic, but a patient reading's slow absorption torques the head to receive their healing touch. The pronouns of these poems are you, I, we, they. As if in echo of Martin Buber's I/Thou, their ooze of mud and membrane intensively multiplies and emerges reveals a molecularity in plant and human. A texturity: maturity, futurity, mutuality, texture. Home as forest floor.
-Erín Moure, author of Theophylline: A Poetic Migration "No one disappears alone-" these linked poems are a pastoral freak-out of the repercussions of a morally tainted language lineage. Halfbelonging, wordnulled, nothingshaped: the human spore, "to people nearby worlds," comes across as "slightly rotten fruits that would disappear faster than I could forget them." Yet, with foresight and empathy, Jun-long Lee's renewed commitment to this one solitary abode is within our reach.
-Weyman Chan, author of Witness Back at Me Art is our attempt to distill the immortal from what is born, grows, and passes away. In this it is like faith, and the poem, a prayer to a constant. Jun-long Lee gives us the world from the other side of our longing for the eternal; his poetry relishes the infirmity of things, the realization that all boundaries are melting edges. It is praise for the invisibleunchanging (to borrow from Lee's enactment of his poetic vision with two words and rejected spacebar). The pleasure of reading Abode is like that of eating the pear ripening in the bowl at just the right time.
-Richard Harrison, author of On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood Something has happened to the world as we know it. We can no longer name the places where we once felt at home. We are no longer ourselves, even if some of us still have hair and nails. Beings slip into caves and under rotten leaves, find hidden nooks in which to breathe and shudder. Through Jun-long Lee's unsettlingly lively series of poems, something new and potent is coming into being. I don't know what it is and neither do you, but we will recognize it because we'll have to. This book is a feathered and fleshy dream, so close it is almost but not quite human.
-Larissa Lai, author of The Tiger Flu