Li-Young Lee

Celebrated poet Li-Young Lee returns with a breathtaking new volume about the violence of desire and the peace of love.

Poems

The Undressing

cee 

sage lynn

A boy becomes a young man in an instant / But not before he learns to say yes to life / is to say yes to death. / To say no to death / is to say no to living.

A young man becomes an old man even quicker. / But not before he gives up life / and death, yes and no.

from “reading, counting, playing alone”

You’d think many deaths early in life, / you’d think having to be silent and still in his father’s arms when / carried away for good / from his native city littered with corpses, / would have taught this young one how to count / the uncountable, / how to hold the immeasurably heavy / in two hands when observing / falling bodies lit to rest in ceremonial rooms. / But watch him with his ball. / He’s still learning. / He doesn’t number his throws, rather / only what falls into his hands.

Don’t say that, she says. / We see by the light of who we are. / Look at us: You inside me / inside you. We’ve lived inside / each other from the beginning. / And from before the beginning. / Before the world was ever found.

The Undressing quotes

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