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The publication of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers in 1974 and Elaine Kim’s Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and their Social Context in 1982 saw an increased interest in Asian American voices in American literature. In its meditation on the ways in which lost origins define our experience, “From Blossoms” indirectly speaks to Lee’s own background as a lifelong exile from his ancestral mainland China. Just as the peaches “carry within [themselves] an orchard” (Line 12), as a kind of living testimony to a vanished history, the poem imagines the immigrant experience of diaspora, or living geographically removed from one’s culture of origin, as representative of the broader human experience of being shaped and defined by the passage of time. Individuals displaced from their places of origin must similarly carry their homelands within themselves in the form of memories.
Lee’s work also continues a literary tradition of adapting theological symbols extending back to the American Transcendentalist Walt Whitman’s 1883 essay “The Bible as Poetry,” as well as to other Romantic and pre-Romantic poets like William Blake and John Milton. Asked about his work’s relationship to immigrant literature in an interview, Lee remarked that the experience of movement and exile
By Li-Young Lee
Early in the Morning
Early in the Morning
Li-Young Lee
Eating Alone
Eating Alone
Li-Young Lee
Eating Together
Eating Together
Li-Young Lee
I Ask My Mother to Sing
I Ask My Mother to Sing
Li-Young Lee
Persimmons
Persimmons
Li-Young Lee
The Gift
The Gift
Li-Young Lee
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