Mitochondrial Night

(Paperback)

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Ed's work deals with war, generational trauma, and colonialism, but he approaches those subjects with a cool-eyed observational stance. The reader isn't let off the hook, but invited to accompany the narrator as he processes what he sees and how it relates to past experience.

These poems have an often theatrical quality (Ed is also a playwright), muddling the space between narrator and spectator, and creating an enlivening intimacy with the speaker.

CHP's Asian American list is one that we're exceptionally proud ofit's deep, and old, and represents a breadth of voices who speak to the spectrum of experience, identity, and interest, and Ed will not only benefit from that context, he's an important part of why we have a reputation for that work in the first place.

Reviews

Winner of the 2012 American Book Award, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN Open Book Award,

There is a nomadic beauty to Ed Bok Lees Whorled, which pulses with raw political anger and vital lyricism. The Guardian

His poems are alternately devastating and grandstanding, word-drunk and built for speed. . . . There is another other / in the other of every / Another, goes the opening poem, All Love Is Immigrant. Its a beautiful poem charged with a breathtaking idea. Whorled is a book that believes love is like a superior kind of capital: its a force that flows into new markets, sensing absences, and fills them, whether its a debased kind of space or an ennobling one.Minneapolis Star Tribune

Elias Canetti remarked that a great writer must be for and against everything in the present time. In ways few Americans have attempted, Whorled takes on that challenge, deepening the reader into true soul work, grief and love for our human fragility. In poem after poem, Lee vividly explores knots of intersecting histories that connect the globes peoples in ways we have yet to take in and imagine. David Mura

Book Riot, "50 Must-read poetry collections of 2019"
Chicago Review of Books, "The Best New Books of March 2019"

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.Publishers Weekly

Like mitochondrion, from whence this exhilarating books title comes, the poets 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 worlds chest. Formally protean and polyphonic, the poems change shapes and registers in a thrilling and often poignant chase after their truth. Ed Bok LeesMitochondrial Nightis a thrilling book by a gifted poet at the height of his powers.Khaled Mattawa

The new kind of poetry Lee forges is wide-ranging and hefty, with long poems knitting together exhaustive description with philosophical assertions while chronicling the past, examining the present and imagining the future.Star Tribune

InMitochondrial 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

A thought-provoking collection that dives into the immigrant and refugee experiences of Lees parents as he envisions his daughter's future. Rooted in reality, the imagistic poems tackle the deep-rooted, long-term effects of colonialism that span generations.Mpls.St.Paul

The literary history of travel writing is also full of spectacular and critical turns, thanks to work by Monique Truong, Bani Amor, and Karen Tei Yamashita, among others, that confronts the legacies of empire, decolonizes tourism, and repurposes the genre to gather up communities forcibly split and scattered.Mitochondrial Nightis a dazzling continuation of this project.Lantern Review Blog

Lees work is intuitively strong; the poems are well-crafted into a series of masterpieces that build on each other, creating a larger master work that reveals a world made up of individuals who endure, survive, and connect. Against the Grain

Author Bio

Ed Bok Lee is the author of Whorled (Coffee House Press) and a recipient of a 2012 American Book Award and the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. Lee is the son of North and South Korean emigrantshis mother originally a refugee from what is now North Korea; his father was raised during the Japanese colonial period and Korean War in what is now South Korea. Lee grew up in South Korea, North Dakota, and Minnesota, and was educated there and on both U.S. coasts, Russia, South Korea, and Kazakhstan. He teaches at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Other honors include the Asian American Literary Award (Members Choice Award) and a PEN Open Book Award.