Mitochondrial Night
• Ed's work deals with war, generational trauma, and colonialism, but he approaches those subjects with a cool-eyed observational stance. The reader isn't let off the hook, but invited to accompany the narrator as he processes what he sees and how it relates to past experience.
• These poems have an often theatrical quality (Ed is also a playwright), muddling the space between narrator and spectator, and creating an enlivening intimacy with the speaker.
• CHP's Asian American list is one that we're exceptionally proud of—it's deep, and old, and represents a breadth of voices who speak to the spectrum of experience, identity, and interest, and Ed will not only benefit from that context, he's an important part of why we have a reputation for that work in the first place.
Ed Bok Lee is the author of Whorled (Coffee House Press) and a recipient of a 2012 American Book Award and the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. Lee is the son of North and South Korean emigrants—his mother originally a refugee from what is now North Korea; his father was raised during the Japanese colonial period and Korean War in what is now South Korea. Lee grew up in South Korea, North Dakota, and Minnesota, and was educated there and on both U.S. coasts, Russia, South Korea, and Kazakhstan. He teaches at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Other honors include the Asian American Literary Award (Members’ Choice Award) and a PEN Open Book Award.
