WATER IN LOVE
How to love like water loves
when it’s impossible to even taste
all the ghostly sediments
each time you take a sip
Impossible to savor
the salt in your blood
the light and island shorelines
in each living cell
When even the plainest mouthful
tastes more of you than you of it
Sweetest of absences
that frees in wave after wave
debris of thought like the dead,
the drowned, the vanished, and yet
sails your lips
on a voyage toward another’s, plying
all luck and regret
Worship, splash, guzzle, or forget
It clears any difference
Stone washer and mountain dissolver
that will
outlive us, even the memory of
all any eyes touched
Wasp and cactus in a desert
Comet through outer space
Sleep among all the cloud-shepherds’ children
A love so perpetually current
it doesn’t care that you love
without even knowing you love
what you couldn’t survive
three days without
How to love like that: wild
dream-sparkler and inmost virtuoso
of every snowflake
Wise, ebullient, and generous
as the rain
Deepest of miracles
for a time
borrowing and replenishing
a self
overflowing with fate.
(“Water in Love” originally published in Hayden’s Ferry Review)
“There is a nomadic beauty to Ed Bok Lee’s Whorled, which pulses with raw political anger and vital lyricism.”
—The Guardian
“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
“His poems carry them with monumental gentleness. . . a reverential force,”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“. . . Ed Bok Lee, whose insightful, exacting poems reflect the intimate ways globalization is transforming our culture and our lives.”
—New York Times
“This sweeping vision of human and environmental justice informs Ed Bok Lee’s writing. . .He disrupts conventional language about native or nonnative species, attending to plantain and clover, sometimes called invasives, often called weeds, and also considers how a word such as ‘weed’ has been used to describe people of color. . .”
—The Missouri Review
“Lee’s poems about massacres, hate crimes and PTSD radiate with ‘a deeper belief in the brightness of human souls…’”
—Star Tribune
“Winner of an American Book Award and a PEN/Open Book Award, Lee strikes a dizzying balance between the organic and the cosmic, the intimate and mythological. In these poems, time collapses to address historic events that influence the now and the yet-to-come. ”
For ASIAN AMERICAN HERITAGE AND HISTORY MONTH:
”Super Insensitive Species”
”If In America”
"The Secret to Life in America" (excerpt), full poem originally published in Real Karaoke People
History K, a play about a South Korean sex worker prepares for her last night of work before retiring due to old age. Premiered at the Playwrights Center
Eye For One, a one-act play about Black and Korean American relations, originally published as E.E. Bok in Writing Away Here: a Korean/American Anthology, Korea Society Press