Mitochondrial Night
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FINALIST: 2019/2020 Midwest Booksellers Choice Award in Poetry; Minnesota Book Award in Poetry
Pub. date March 5, 2019 | Coffee House Press | ISBN: 978-1-56689-532-3
Taking mitochondrial DNA as his guide, Lee explores familial and national legacies, and their persistence across shifting boundaries and the erosions of time. In these poems, the trait of an ancestor appears in the face of a newborn, and in her cry generations of women’s voices echo. Stories, benign and traumatic, travel far and wide. Using lush, exact imagery, whether about the corner bar or an invasion in medieval Korea, Lee is a careful observer, tracking and documenting the way that seemingly small moments can explode into larger insights.
“Lee takes a scientific departure point (the accrual of matrilineal DNA) and provocatively combines it with trauma theory (the discipline which posits that trauma can be passed from one generation to the next) in an attempt to answer these questions. . . His poems carry them with monumental gentleness. . . a reverential force,”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“This is Lee's third book of poetry, and it's epic in scope, exploring everything from our cellular history to ancestral memory to the future of the human soul.”
—All Things Considered
“. . . Ed Bok Lee, whose insightful, exacting poems reflect the intimate ways globalization is transforming our culture and our lives.”
—New York Times
“A Korean American poet, Lee incorporates themes of immigration into poems like “Super-Insensitive Species,” which parallels the birth of his mixed-race daughter against the pervading fear that invading Asian carp will take over American ecosystems. . . . In Mitochondrial Night, Lee incorporates imagery we accept to be endless—the systems of our body and of space—to explore how we create rather than find certainty. Concluding the collection, the freestanding poem “Water in Love” returns to the question of how we love. . .”
—Entropy Mag
“Like mitochondrion, from whence this exhilarating book’s title comes, the poet’s eye and spirit are ubiquitous, examining and probing the tangled bloodlines of our social and political networks, and the parasitic heft we are exerting on the world’s chest. Formally protean and polyphonic, the poems change shapes and registers in a thrilling and often poignant chase after their truth. Ed Bok Lee’s Mitochondrial Night is a thrilling book by a gifted poet at the height of his powers.” —Khaled Mattawa
“In Mitochondrial Night, Ed Bok Lee takes us on an intimate journey through space and time, introduces us to people and places we have and have not met, to center us in our humblest humanity. Lee is a shaman, he rides with his pen into the vast darkness of our pasts, centers us in our present, and then makes the fearless leap into the imagined, the predestined future. He looks to raise from the dead the spirits of wars lost, wars long forgotten, the wars being waged now, and he does so with a light, lonely hand. This collection is explosive; it shatters the boundaries of self in the service of art.” —Kao Kalia Yang
