Esther Lee

Esther Lee (Poetry) | Atlanta, GA

Booking Fee:

$1000-$3000

Will Travel:

Anywhere

Contact:

estroid@gmail.com

Website:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/esther-lee

Esther Lee is a poet, essayist, & letterpress fanatic. She is the author of the chapbook, Blank Missives (Trafficker Press) & the poetry collection, Spit, selected for the Elixir Press Poetry Prize & nominated for the PEN Open Book Award & Asian American Literary Awards. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Verse Daily, DIAGRAM, Hyphen, Born Magazine, Lantern Review, & elsewhere. A Kundiman Fellow, she served as Editor-in-Chief for Indiana Review and her work has received the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, Snowcroft Prose Prize, and Utah Writer’s Contest Award selected by Brenda Shaughnessy, as well as three Pushcart Prize nominations. Her second poetry manuscript titled, “Chromogenic,” was a recent finalist for the Kundiman Poetry Prize and National Poetry Series.

Books

Lee_Spit
Spit (Elixir Press, 2011)

Press & Reviews

Esther Lee’s Spit shines. Filled with bravado and brilliance, Lee’s debut fills in the blanks it makes profound use of, hollering across the “rusted hollows.” Utilizing a host of forms, from montage to prose poems, “Interviews with My [C]orean Father” to fractured sonnets. Lee echoes and evokes a multitude of identities: writer, sister, “good girl,” lover. If this is the future of American poetry, as it appears to be, we are in good hands.
—Kevin Young

Spit, Esther Lee’s debut collection of poems, interrogates the many tenuous connections that get forged….Here are visceral poems in which gardens are watered with urine, family members are marked by each others’ “spit and fingernails,” where love is tempered with violence. Still, the violence of the family life is a reflection of the ironic violence of the [C]orean immigrant experience in America, one in which its participants must leave one politically disrupted culture to join the other that helped to destroy it: a process that often historically negates the pain [C]orean individuals have had to endure in order to preserve the American “melting pot” mythology. Fresh and brutal, serious and comic, Spit is a deeply heartfelt examination of family, language, and personal connection in this multi-ethnic, multi-historied America. “Convert me please,” Lee writes. Converted.
—Paisley Rekdal

Esther Lee’s poems are calling out to the other in her wild quest to find herself. In letters, interviews and prayers she asks, pleads, demands recognition because she is the “good girl fight[ing] a medium-sized meteor,” and the thing is hurling through space and aimed at her heart. In lines of breathtaking dexterity she juggles images and language itself like a romantic master. Her questions are plainspoken and elegant, straight-edged and rococo, high-minded and hilarious. Oh, the worlds that swirl in the brain of this poet, and we are lucky enough to be on the odyssey with her.
—Barbara Hamby

Love what we do? Take a second to support us on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!