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WishboneBy Priscilla Lee2000, 79 pages, paperback. |
Publisher's Webpage for this Book
ORDER -- Item #3011, Price $12.50
"Priscilla Lee's wonderful Wishbone draws together cultures and varied experiences to form a mature wisdom. A sensuous intelligence of body and mind helps to unite the sacred and profane, and a tension is created in these poems that surprises and pleases. This young poet's words dance within her well controlled, provocative images—a distilled passion that takes little for granted in this imaginative, observed arena of chance and honed design. Wishbone is bold and tender, shaped out of classical mythologies and everyday life into an earned beauty we can trust."
"In Wishbone, Priscilla Lee mixes Kuan Yin and Christmas lights, shark fin dumplings and shots of tequila, the sound of mah jong tiles and slashing punk-rock guitar riffs.... Lee patrols the borders of experience with a keen eye and ear for the stories of those who, like Lee herself, perpetually cross back and forth between past and present, fortune and accident, dreams and waking life. It's our good luck that from her relentless attention she has fashioned these rich, involving poems."
Book Description from the Publisher's Website
Pulling details from the fierce peculiarities of everyday life, these plainly spoken, courageous poems chronicle the life of an Asian American woman straddling two cultures. At a crossroads of family history and present time, the poems grapple with conflict, failure, and limits that are ultimately transcended and resolved-through acceptance, love, fate, and the raw power of poetry itself-into a wild happiness. The poems also celebrate the poet's source of strength, her great love for her grandmother: a wise, Buddhist fortune-telling midwife/seamstress.
Comments from Back Cover
"Through Priscilla Lee's Wishbone, we enter a world both magical and harrowing, where the barracudas are melancholy and porcupines are kept as pets, a world in which a firing squad and America are a telegram apart. Seldom are we blessed with a first book as poignant and absorbing as this one is, as street-pure, as wise."
- Carolyn Forché
- Yusef Komunyakaa
- Kim Addonizio
Background on Priscilla Lee
Priscilla Lee received her B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a recipient of both the Emily Chamberlain Cook Poetry Prize and the James D. Phelan Literary Award. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyan Review, ZYZZYVA, Storming Heaven's Gate: An Anthology of Women's Spiritual Writing (Plume), Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women (Beacon Press), and other journals and anthologies. She works as a technical writer and lives in San Francisco with her husband.
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Copyright © 2004 by AACP, Inc.
Most recent revision December 31, 2004