Illinois Authors

Cambria Press Louisville, Ky. : 2022

This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series (general editor: Victor H. Mair). Conversant in critical and creative modes of thought, this book examines the uses of translation in Asian and Anglophone literatures to bridge discontinuous subjectivities in Eurasian transnational identities and translingual hybridizations of literary Modernism. Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations focuses on the roles of mysticism and language in Dictée's poetic deconstruction of empire, engaging metaphysical issues salient in the history of translation studies to describe how Theresa Cha and four other authors--Sui Sin Far, Chuang Hua, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Virginia Woolf--used figurative and actual translations to bridge discontinuous subjectivities. The author Karen Lee's explorations of linguistic politics and poetics in this eclectic group of writers concentrates on the play of innovative language deployed to negotiate divided or multiple consciousness. Over the past decade, emerging scholarship on transnationalism and writers of Asian heritage has focused primarily on diasporic Asian literary production on American soil. For instance, Rachel Lee's seminal publication, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (1999), examines how Asian American feminist literary criticism is shaped by global-local influences in the United States. Additionally, Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits (2006), edited by Shirley Lim, et al., explores the transnational aspects of Asian literature in America, analyzing a discursive globalized imaginary as American writers Asian of heritage move within and across national boundaries. Following Lim's anthology, Lan Dong's Transnationalism and the Asian American Heroine (2010) concerns the representations of women transposed from Asian oral traditions of "women warriors" to the United States. However, less scholarship on the Anglophone literatures of Asia and the Americas has focused on Asian writers within broader comparative frameworks of global perspectives outside Asian American literature and in comparison to Asian British literature, or aside from the parameters of specific Asia-to-America tropes such as the aforementioned "woman warrior," as in Sheng-mei Ma's Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998), or Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa's Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001). Uniquely situated among these discussions, Lee's book extends current lines of inquiry by including the oeuvres of diasporic Asian writers in Asia, America, and abroad, presenting their works within the contexts of transnationalism via the dual lenses of translation and translingual migration. As new scholarship, this book foregrounds literary transnationalism and translingual migrations in a context of East to West as a study of representative Anglophone literatures in the Asian diaspora. Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations is highly relevant to university teaching audiences in postcolonial literature, Asian American studies, Anglophone writers of the Asian diaspora, cultural feminism, Eurasian studies, and translation studies.

Cascade Books 2022

Duress is a collection of devotional poems for souls in search of spiritual restoration—its contemporary psalms, lamentations, meditations, and praises were composed during the “anthropause” when the world paused. A poetry of resiliency, lyric in pulse and contemplative in spirit, it will encourage and uplift weary hearts of wayfarers in a season of duress.

Swan Scythe Press 2002

In this prize-winning collection of poems, Karen An-hwei Lee unscrolls a sequence of meditations by a woman`s spirit as it moves from blindness through a felt world of tasks--cooking as a deed of the inner eye, fragrance as a spiritual air, even a wardrobe of mystical dresses and one orthopedic shoe. This book invites us into a beautiful consciousness and wraps us utterly in vision.

Sarabande Books Louisville, Ky. : 2004

Ambitious and original, Karen An-hwei Lee’s first book-length poem is in the form of an eccentric dictionary. In Medias Res brings to mind the long poems of Anne Carson, though Lee is less concerned with ironies than with mysteries. In compressed and oddly slanted “definitions,” ranging from one line, “A paper bird unopened until marriage” (“Comparison”), to longer, parable-like narratives, Lee’s poem moves through the alphabet to limn the border between language and spirit. Often playful and slyly humorous, In Medias Res is an investigation into how God hides in language. Karen Lee has made a brilliant entry into poetry.

Ellipsis Press 2022

In a dystopic future of unregulated gene editing, a woman named Emily wakes up on the wrong side of the universe as an octopus thanks to rogue "designer genes" run amok. One of thousands of clones generated from a genetic code sequenced from a lock of hair saved from the original Emily Dickinson, the ersatz Emily resembles an octopus but harbors the soul of a human poet and navigates her life in a lagoon as a bumbling "rogue soul" enamored of black spice cake, botanical monographs, and gingerbread recipes, while romanced by personified moonlight.

Tupelo Press North Adams, Mass. : 2012

There’s an undeniable audacity in a poet using the word “joy” in our beleaguered world. In her new book, Karen An-hwei Lee combines scientific precision and an appetite for far-flung vocabularies with a fascination for the sources of rapturous emotion. In poems that roam from the intimacy of prayer to the art of brewing tea, from bamboo-related famine to quasars, the globe’s minor seas, and the nuptial flight of ants, Phyla of Joy reaches toward ecstasy.

Slant Books 2021

A little more than two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Virgil wrote his Georgics, a long poetic sequence about agriculture, suffused with profound reflections on the relationship between humanity, nature, and the divine-and reflecting the political turmoil of his times. California poet Karen An-hwei Lee, inspired by Virgil, has created her own dense, richly-layered collection of "Neo-Georgics," constituting an extended exploration of such motifs as happiness, olive groves, vineyards, soil chemistries, the seacoast, and the birth of trees. In Lee's contemporary rendering we confront an environment blighted by our carbon footprint; advancements in agricultural technology and genetic engineering; the digital age; fossil fuel transportation; and vanishing bees. Rose Is a Verb explores the ancient tradition of agrarian labor, including tilling the soil and interpreting weather signs and war omens. The poems flash with verbal ingenuity and mind-bending allusions-challenging the heart and mind but repaying slow, careful readings many times over. A meditation on the natural environment, this collection serves as a biomythography of procreation and a reflection on the meaning of happiness.

Ellipsis Press 2017

Fiction. California Interest. Asian & Asian American Studies. Who is Kafka-san? Is he a digitally remastered hologram of the famous writer? Or a golem engineered from a finger-bone excavated from a grave in Prague? Or just your garden-variety flesh-and-blood clone? No one is quite sure, least of all K, a Nisei woman hired to be Kafka-san's interpreter and chauffeur through millennial Los Angeles. In resplendent, incandescent prose, Karen An-hwei Lee fashions this short, strange trip out of a mind meld between the Czech fabulist of bureaucracies and a sun-hammered late-empire sprawl. Mary Caponegro says that the "verbal and the sensual are fused under [Lee's] supple pen, and you will marvel at her capacity to animate words, releasing them from habit and predictability into buoyancy." And Norman Lock states that "Lee has written a Waste Land for our time, whose symbolic epicenter is Los Angeles; her novella is, at once, a present dystopia and an uncanny invocation of Kafka, serving time in a penal colony where consumption and its proliferating glossaries have gone mad."

Baobab Press 2022

A collection of visions shared across cyberspace, Souvenirs, a collaboration between authors Andrew Colarusso and Karen An-hwei Lee, celebrates fragments from the literary afterlife. In Souvenirs, a philosophically astute, poetically searing collection of miniature fictions and contemporary fables, objects take on shapes of their own designs creating a composite map to a world populated with little transparent souls and ghost ships in lost bottles; a menagerie of curios; photophores of bioluminescence humming in the depths: light begetting light, deep calling to deep. In these twenty-seven prose gems, it seems that Colarusso and Lee are writing from a single mind as they strike a balance between humor and philosophy; the acute and the everlasting. The ideas they discuss―religion, faith, universality, continuance―are large, but their prose is accessible, and at times outright hilarious. Strange, compelling, and arcane considerations of watches, jade, seaweed, and cake, among many other items, come through with stylistic prowess and earnest, intelligent considerations. Souvenirs adds complexity to the mundane, re-centers the iconic, and gifts the reader with nothing short of astonishment; wonder baked into each delicious slice.

Tupelo Press 2024

A collection of poems that blesses the reader with a spirit of hope, solace, and inspiration in their own seasons of adversity. The Beautiful Immunity asks how we create good in an imperfect world of fallible souls. Spare and formally daring, these poems were refined through the catastrophes of wildfires, recession, and a major public health crisis through the hope of a beautiful immunity—an everlasting salve for the lost. This slender volume reads as the culmination of more than a decade’s worth of labor, documenting large-scale social, cultural, and political upheavals, as well as the moment when the word “anthropause” floated indelibly into the world’s vocabulary.

Ellipsis Press 2019

Fiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. "A former data cloud narrates the story of its creator, Yang, a former tech elite after a digital shutdown collapses the technocracy and discorporates vast clouds of data, as he undertakes a journey to find, among the ruins of the mezzopolis, the seven harbingers of happiness. But this cloud is also a poet, which is to say, LEE'S WRITING DAZZLINGLY ILLUMINATES THE INNER LIFE OF DATA... This is a polyglot guide to existential collapse, a multivalent antiserum for the promises of technological progress. WE NEED THIS BOOK."--Evelyn Hampton "Karen An-hwei Lee is brilliant."--Harold Abramowitz