Critical Essay | Critical Review by Publishers Weekly

Critical Review by Publishers Weekly

SOURCE: Review of Book of My Nights, by Li-Young Lee. Publishers Weekly 248, no. 28 (9 July 2001): 63.

In the following review, the critic focuses on questions of origins raised by Book of My Nights.

Passionate and profound, Lee's long-awaited third collection [Book of My Nights] charts the mid-life ontological crisis of a speaker who “can't tell what my father said about the sea … from the sea itself,” and finds himself unmoored without that strong male voice. Lee's father was a personal physician to Mao Zedong, who took the family to Jakarta (where Lee was born) in the '50s. As Indonesia began persecuting Chinese citizens and his father was imprisoned, Lee's family left the country, spent five years moving from place to place in Asia, and arrived in the U.S. in 1964. (These events are described in The Winged Seed. Lee's American Book Award-winning memoir of 1995.) Lee...
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