More on: Li-Young Lee

WHEN MY FATHER finished seminary at Vanderbilt, he served his first small church in Beech Bluff, Tennessee. He was single and drove a little moped. He took disco dancing lessons to stave off loneliness and survived on church ladies’ casseroles. That summer he was working as a counselor at a church summer camp when he…

It’s just time, the book I read, the letter I write, the window I look out of. It’s just a needle I thread, a sleeve I keep trying to mend, the spool diminishing. It’s just time inside of time, the future inside the seeds inside the pulp of the apple I eat, skin and all,…

I loved you before I was born. It doesn’t make sense, I know. I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see. And I’ve lived longing for your every look ever since. That longing entered time as this body. And the longing grew as this body waxed. And the longing grows as this body…

This sadness I feel tonight is not my sadness. Maybe it’s my father’s. For having never been prized by his father. For having never profited by his son. This loneliness is Nobody’s. Nobody’s lonely because Nobody was never born and will never die. This gloom is Someone Else’s. Someone Else is gloomy because he’s always…

Li-Young Lee’s books of poetry include Rose (1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award; The City in Which I Love You (1990), which was a Lamont Poetry Selection; Book of My Nights (2001), which won the William Carlos Williams Award; From Blossoms: Selected Poems (2007), and Behind My Eyes (2008). His other work…