Phyla of Joy

Poetry. Asian American Studies. "Karen An-hwei Lee's third book is a beautiful and sustained meditation on the impermanence of humanity's essential components: memory, spirituality, emotion, thought.... Contemplative and linguistically sophisticated, PHYLA OF JOY is simply exquisite'ink and stanza / flow like wind on grass.'"Rigoberto Gonzalez There's an undeniable audacity in a poet using the word "joy" in our beleaguered world. In her new book, Karen An-hwei Lee combines scientific precision and an appetite for far-flung vocabularies with a fascination for the sources of rapturous emotion. In poems that roam from the intimacy of prayer to the art of brewing tea, from bamboo-related famine to quasars, the globe's minor seas, and the nuptial flight of ants, PHYLA OF JOY reaches toward ecstasy.