The Undressing

January 1, 2018

This fifth book from William Carlos Williams Award winner Lee (Book of My Nights) elucidates his family's history and the sometimes violent circumstances surrounding their escape from China to Indonesia as political refugees finally settling in the United States in 1964. Lee's background as a Presbyterian minister lends great spiritual deftness and an ecclesiastical quietude that proves refreshing. Between deeply moving accounts of his relationship to his family, especially his mother and their shared unspoken trauma, Lee outlines the seductions of love and death, how both hold us in similar thrall. While one might be forgiven for seeing the multipage title poem, an account of a man undressing a woman who seems uninterested in his sexual advances, as a bit tone deaf given the current conversation surrounding sexual assault, in all, the poems that follow deepen the metaphor beyond a shallow sexual angle with spiritual, familial, and cultural dimensions. VERDICT Lee's stillness and clarity alone, based on their rarity in contemporary poetry, make this a collection worth having. Add to that the depth of history, memory, and familial trauma and one is left with a stunning addition to an oeuvre already widely and deservedly appreciated.--Trevor Ketner, Junior Library Guild

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2018
Listen, / she says, words of timeless enchantment that begin the title poem and launch this book of balancing acts along the axis between body and soul, past and present, dark and light. The Undressing is an erotic, witty, and cosmic duel between lovers in which she tells him to pay attention to the spirit while he kisses, caresses, and disrobes her. The first bird of many in this meditative book cries, Two! / There are two worlds! The poet dreams of oneness. In his first collection since Behind My Eyes (2008), Lee, a much-awarded poet with a passionate readership, presents breath-catching metaphysical equations in incantatory cadences that swing between earth and sky, flesh and holiness. Shifting from the universal to the personal, he revisits traumatic memories of his Chinese-in-exile family fleeing ethnic violence in Indonesia. Addressing unspeakable terror in words that have been sieved and distilled and sieved again, Lee enacts another form of undressing, which leaves the reader further undone. In Changing Places in the Fire, the poet spars with a sparrow with a woman's face, his battle angel, who cries, What's The Word! Lee responds with an exquisite, enthralling, and ringing call to wind, trees, sea, the beloved, and love, both human and sacred.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)