Nonfiction

The Winged Seed: A Remembrance

With a new Foreword by the author and never-before-seen photographs of the author's family and childhood

This reissuing of acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee's American Book Award-winning memoir tells the harrowing story of the author's early years. In the 1950s, the Lee family was forced to flee China's political turmoil for Indonesia where, in 1957, Li-Young Lee was born. Rather than safe haven, the family, along with many other Chinese members of the population, found themselves persecuted under President Sukarno. Falsely accused and charged for crimes against the state, Li-Young Lee's father spent a year and a half in jail as a political prisoner, half of that time in a leper colony. One stormy night while the entire family was being transported to prison colony, they escaped and began a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, and finally back to Hong Kong where the poet's father rose to prominence as an evangelical preacher. In 1962, they sought asylum in the United States and shortly thereafter emigrated to a small town in western Pennsylvania where Li-Young Lee's father became a minister to an all-white Presbyterian congregation. In finely spun threads of poetic prose, Li-Young Lee carries us through the experiences that informed his four award-winning poetry collections and helped shape the vision of one of America's most celebrated poets.

FormatPaperback

$16.00

About the Author

Li-Young Lee is the author of four collections of poetry, three from BOA Editions: Book of My Nights (2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; The City in Which I Love You (1990), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose (1986) which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. His other work includes Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (BOA, 2006), a collection of twelve interviews with Lee at various stages of his artistic development; and The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon & Schuster, 1995), a memoir which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. A second edition of The Winged Seed: A Remembrance was published by BOA in 2013 which included a new forward by the author.