Asterism

Lee articulates the joys and alienations of being an outsider in her contemplative debut. Born in South Korea, Lee grew up in Peru with her Korean parents, never feeling quite like she belonged. Yet, this rootlessness inspires more awe than agony. She frequently draws culinary connections to these feelings; a whiff of sesame oil is “the smell of an unfamiliar soil,/ a country I was born to but didn’t/ grow up with.” Elsewhere, Lee fills the empty space of her ignorance with the folkloric, imagining new beginnings: “My origin story: My mother found me as a chestnut dangling”; “When I was given a norigae to hang/ under my first hangbok jacket, I foresaw/ a pendulous love in my life. I alternated/ between laughing and sobbing. Short horns/ appeared on my back.” She writes with reverence of watching her mother make kimchi and seeing her cry “when she’d had no one to talk to in Korean.” Later, Lee declares of her mother, “She taught me how to be a foreigner,/ garner my sunspots, some left by harsher stars,/ some gentler, knit a plentiful basket out of myself.” Peppered with polyglotism, tender with the thrills of discovery—of a new food, friend, or facet of oneself—these poems make Lee’s wonder for the world palpable. (Feb.)