ABOUT THIS BOOK

“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 González

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), selected for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize by Heather McHugh and chosen for the Norma Farber First Book Award by Cole Swensen. A former writing resident at the MacDowell Colony of the Arts and the Millay Arts Colony and recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts grant, she currently chairs the English Department at a faith-based college in southern California, where she is also a novice harpist.

REVIEWS

“Karen An-Hwei Lee’s Phyla of Joy, is a marvel of light, blossoming flowers, and discovery. Its cover showcases a blooming flower. Inside, the poems bloom as well” — Whittney Jones, New Madrid

“The poems are exceedingly visual, and much of the music in the poems corresponds to the tightly concrete—yet also seductively puzzling—images. Many of the poems are contemplative in tone, but they develop their meaning (if meaning is what they’re aiming for) through juxtaposition of imagery rather than explanation. I found myself rereading several of the poems, sometimes because I found the language so attractive, sometimes because I didn’t quite understand; most often, I experienced both responses simultaneously. I realized, eventually, that these are poems to sit with, to absorb, to pick up and put down and pick up again.”— Lynn Domina

“Reading Phyla of Joy is akin to listening to the reverberations of a singing bowl: first, one is attracted to the struck note, but the diminishing vibrations last a long time, compelling a continuing reflection.”— Ann E. Michael, Poets’ Quarterly

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CONTENTS
1
Yingri 3
Pear-Skin Zisha 4
Prayer for a Bamboo-Flowering Famine 6
Dream of Ink-Brush Calligraphy 7
Prayer of Resistance 8
Meditation on a Cenote 9
Prayer under Mesa Light 10
Dream of Metasequoia 11
Sunday Is 12
Fire Season 13
Sweet Glossolalia 14
Preservation of Rare Languages 15
Praver for Himalayan Bees 17
On Twelve Minor Seas 19
Song of Feminaries 21
Phyla of Joy 22

2
Love and Solvency 25
Ounce of Camphor 26
Prayer for an Underground Supplicant 27
Prayer of a Xuerou Apiary 28
Questions and Canticles 29
Horses of Famine, Horses of War 30
Psalm I 31
Psalm II 32
Psalm III 33
Psalm IV 34
Psalm V 35
Faith by Hearing 36

3
Invocation 39
Hyacinth Sea Room In Praise of Wasps 40
Selenographia I 41
Selenographia II 42
Selenographia III 43
Selenographia IV 45
Selenographia V 46
Tea-Picking Opera 48
Celadon Stone 49
Celadon Glass 50
Celadon Water 52
Celadon Praise 53
Theories of the Soul 54
Prayer of Nuptial Flight 56
Notes 59
Acknowledgments 63