Description: "Selected by John Murillo as the winner of the Dorset Prize, Asterism contemplates the wonders and challenges of polycentric living, ultimately interrogating capitalist enactments of fixed and exclusive belonging. Migrating between S. Korea, Peru, and the U.S., the poet finds luminous homes at the interstices of bridges, flight layovers, languages, desires, imperfect memories, and mutable mouths. Lee blurs the line between self and other as words translated into connotations meet on the page with portraits of co-inhabited identities, histories, and tender relationships. Throughout, each line longingly, bravely unfurls towards strangeness and beauty of her own making"--
Brief description: Ae Hee Lee holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks: Bedtime Riverbed, Dear bear, and Connotary, the last of which was selected as the winner for the 2021 Frost Place Chapbook Competition
Review Quotes: "I have been waiting quite a while for a poet to risk the elegance and gestural audacity of the Baroque upon issues of origin and identity. All too often, these issues vex and distort our poetry. But in Asterism, they amplify the language of Ae Hee Lee onto a ravishing spree of utterance and image. There is great breadth here, and heartening innovation." -- "Donald Revell"