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Called a “tangled process of remembering” by Luke Wiget of
BOMB magazine's
BOMBLOG.com,
The Winged Seed: A Remembrance is a “remembrance of love and death and God.” The critically acclaimed and American Book Award-winning memoir, originally published in 1995 and then put out of print, has been reissued by BOA this spring, with a new Foreword by Li-Young Lee and a collection of his family and childhood photographs.
"To hear Lee’s voice in the present, some 18 years after the book’s initial publication and sounding just as sure and also as shaky, is the real appeal with this new publication," says the
BOMB review. "[Lee] writes in the Foreword, 'It’s just time: the book I read, the letter I write, the window I look out of. Just a sleeve I keep trying to mend, the spool diminishing.' Lee’s story is not over, it can’t ever be."
The review also pulls from a former interview
BOMB had with Lee upon the book's initial publication. “I can’t stop thinking about love and death; no other issues interest me,” Lee told
BOMB in the '95 interview. “Sound is a lot more important to me than sense.”
While most of Lee's work is about "his family and the struggle to assimilate and create and keep hold of a sense of self," much of
The Winged Seed drives for "something beyond... a new kind of knowing." In fact, according to the review, "There was a time as a child that Li-Young Lee could not speak. When he later broke his silence it was with one hand over his mouth like he was chewing food. 'My mouth was a shame to me, an indecent trench,' he says at one point. In Lee we see the profundity of a mute poet, a listener. And it seems true that possibly the best poets are part mute... So much of his work is about listening and silence... what it is to listen."
Click here to read the entire
BOMB review.
Click here to purchase your copy of the newly reissued
The Winged Seed.