Sherry Quan Lee’s book, Chinese Blackbird, is a fascinating narration of how race is lived in the United States today. Born to a Black mother and a Chinese father, much of Sherry Quan Lee’s life was spent understanding race as she lived it in the United States.  In the opening poem of the collection, she writes, “I am pregnant with myself / gestation: fifty years.” She comes to poetry later in life, but with the emotional power and languages of a convert.

Quan Lee describes her lfe, “Like a magnolia / –whose sepals never fuse00 / my life is disparate / here a Black / community, //there an Asian / community, // everywhere, white.” Chinese Blackbird is the narrative of Quan Lee’s life and her exploration of race, gender, love, and marriage. It is fierce and tender, angry and understanding, hurt and honest.

Some might call the book, not a poetry collection, but a textual gathering of one woman’s life. Indeed, the poems are accented by photographs of Quan Lee and her family and her birth certificate. They are important visual moves in the collection, adding connection for the reader to these poems. Many of the poems are written in the style of prose poems, such as “Magnolia Cafe,” “Mother’s and Mine,” and “I Ask My Husband if He Thought I was a Lesbian and He Said Yes.” This density of language and narrative builds throughout the book to Quan Lee’s final assertion of herself as an autonomous Chinese/Black/Woman in “I Am the Snake I feared,” she writes,

Sometimes I think I’m whispering
when you complain I’m hissing.

I’m sorry if my word are noisy, but

I haven’t left. I’m not leaving.
Only my thoughts wander

I am home, for the first time
in fifty-four years, venomless.

Quan Lee’s poems and this book, Chinese Blackbird, are the examples of the space and legacy that Jorddan and Lorde dreamed when they wrote their truth on the page.

 Sharon Doubiago is one of my writing mentors.  She has strong connections to Minnesota/Minnesota writers, although this story is located in California where she grew up as a girl.

Sherry Quan Lee

Wild Ocean Press Announces the release of Sharon Doubiago’s Memoir My Father’s Love: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl 

 

In this first volume of her two-volume memoir, prize-winning poet Sharon Doubiago writes an extraordinary story of growing up in the 1940s and 50s in South Central LA and the desert mountain town of Ramona in San Diego County. My Father’s Love addresses the current controversies of memory and memoir and sets new standards for the genre by adhering to historical records, letters, diaries, interviews, and a drive to know the unfabricated truth, while weaving these, in stunning language and imagery, with remembering and reliving. This book attempts to understand her family rooted deep in the history of America, in both its Southern aristocracy and its victims. It looks at the world through the eyes of a child who knows what love is, a girl labeled beautiful, a victim of rape, incest and psychological terrorism, depicting the genesis of an American epic poet. It will change your perspective of the world forever.

 To order, go to: http://www.wildoceanpress.com/

 

or: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=doubiago&x=0&y=0

 www.sharondoubiago.com

 

Only the written word saves when all else fails, July 30, 2009

How to Write a Suicide Note: serial essays that saved a woman’s life

Desperation in shifting waves of rhythm; hope in scuttling across consciousness of living; rolling in the distance between self and the outside; a poetical delirium giving out vibes of bitter truth and sweet resilience – there is so much of substance in Sherry Quan Lee’s poetry titled How to Write a Suicide Note (Modern History Press, 2008) that one may assert it as a crash course in the impact of growing up as a woman and as an ethnic minority in a multicultural society.

For its title, Lee’s book stands in danger of rousing fear or concern, sounding like an offer of assistance in passing to the other side – the dreaded one. But thanks to the subtitle serial essays that saved a woman’s life, which gives a hint of the book’s greater purpose. And yet, it takes a while before an average reader can come to terms with Lee’s desultoriness so profusely showing in each page of her verse like a medium catching vibes from multiple dimensions and conveying them in a somewhat unsorted pattern. Persistence and concentration on behalf of the reader brings joy and depth to Lee’s message, interwoven with her personal story, cultural critique, and philosophical/existential interpretation of life experiences.

Lee’s poetry in How to Write a Suicide Note is one of the few that probe into the origin of emotional trauma as something beyond the individual; living as a Black-Chinese woman in a white-dominated society, her status as a woman of a minority class culturally pressured her into becoming (and acting) someone she really was not; hence, the pain of deprivation from the natural right of self-expression. For Lee, it is a historical trauma traveling through the medium of culture with individuals at the receiving end. What is purely individual, however, is her artistic fluidity with which she creates palpable imagery and brings spontaneity to the thought prevalent in the moment:

`I smoke wearing fleeced gloves. Smoke hangs in the air like
frigid poems burning holes in hands that need to write
suicide notes…’ (page 9)

In several poems, Lee points to the therapeutic effect of writing as a life-saving habit. Writing suicide notes in her verse symbolizes the involvement with life even when the straw of hope is not in reach; she shows that our thinking about life, about writing about it, and actually coming back to life through the written work, are all saviors of life. Only the written word saves when all else fails before the trauma of a scarred identity. And it is so tersely put in one of her poems Because Writing Saves Lives:

`When you can, write
When you can’t live.
When you can’t live, write.’ (page 16)

Reckoned as the first (and only) poetry book by the Modern History Press – as the publisher found its message so irresistibly revealing, and one of the very first books about living as a Black-Chinese woman in America, How to Write a Suicide Note is a unique read, full of life, and throbbing with the will to live again as a person out of the reach of trauma.