Daughter

by Janice Lee

“Daughter is quantum. There is a girl, there is an octopus, there is language -- in minimal bursts of physical intensities, their magnitude measured in intimate discretes. Janice Lee's prose is energy transfer of the elementary particles of the matter of language. There is a girl, there is an octopus, there is language, understood at the infinitesimal level. No other book ever written has entered my body and being so physically pure. There is not distance between the state of narrative and the matter of being. I turn the page of her body.”
– Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Reel to Reel

In Daughter, Janice Lee floods the body of a book with the body of a body, all its hybrid, constantly damaging and mending cells. From field to field among the pages we are subject to a brain-damaged, collide-o-scopic file of some internet-age Acker'd Frankenstein having lived to see god die; and yet still must go on walking in the deity's corpse, inside of which the billion bodies in such image have built our huts of shit and shit inside them. "The sea is a mysterious force, but there is no sea in the desert," she writes, prodding at the hole left in the fabric on the earth between the homes: another phantom in a field of phantoms who themselves have again died. The result is a meticulous and terrifying resurrection, a glitchy screamtext passed in dire silence to the reader the way blood passes from mother into child.
– Blake Butler, author of There is No Year

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

142 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

JANICE LEE (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 8 books of fiction, creative nonfiction, & poetry: KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award, and A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima (Meekling Press, 2023). An essay (co-authored with Jared Woodland) is featured in the recently released 4K restoration of Sátántangó (dir. Béla Tarr) from Arbelos Films. She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, and facilitates guided meditations bringing together elements from several different lineages as a mesa-carrying practitioner of the Q’ero tradition of medicine work and as a practitioner of Engaged Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh). She also incorporates elements of ancestor work, Korean shamanic ritual (Muism), traditional Korean folk practices, plant medicine & flower essence work, card readings & divination, and interspecies communication. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.

Reviews

[Peter Tieryas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adding a video review:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh8TOm...

It's so rare for a book that not only experiments with ideas, but the form and craft of writing itself. Janice Lee's, "Daughter," is probably one of the most unique and thought-provoking books I've read in recent memory. There are some pages where the paragraphs burst with fascinating ideas that make you question the whole of existence. There are some beautiful photos (by Rochelle Ritchie Spencer) within its pages, a compelling menagerie that perfectly accompanies the text. Some lines of the book I liked were, "A meeting with a shadow, where fishers or dwellers of the deep look up at me out of the bright blue, harmless, but it draws me near and it is haunted." And, "There is a daughter who is an excavator of dead gods, slapping down a stone path, with a stick in one hand, a mirror in the other, a gatherer of worries and prayers, a jar full of whispers and echoes." Those images are intensely compelling and what's great is the book aligns itself in the image of an octopus, a theme that recurs throughout the book. You can read it from beginning to end, drop in and pick parts from the middle, or read it in reverse. "Daughter," by Janice Lee, can best be described as an experience. And it's unlike any other.

[Tantra Bensko · Rating 5 out of 5]

The idea that this is called a novel is wonderful, creating a new idea of what narrative, what linear progression of a story can entail, and thus, what life is, what our minds are, and what god and his brother, god, see when they look at the world through us, and our subconscious.

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very fragmented and very whole at the same time, with a dynamic use of the surface of the page. I was particularly interested in the the forceful use of Nietzsche's dead god as a motif and some terminology that leaked in from neuroscience. This book seems to be published as fiction, which maybe isnt entirely accurate, but it occupies a beautifully smart hybrid territory with really fantastic writing.

[Steve Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Monster vs. octopus. They both win.

[Heidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

and then, and then, i fuel the fire of your most secret vanity
//
selittämätön kirja

[Siel Ju · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Who is to say I’m not God and I just don’t remember it?”
*
Janice Lee’s slim novel is a very poetic work — full of disruptions, non sequiturs, and fractured dialogue. There’s a vague semblance of a plot involving the daughter, her mother, and an octopus found in the desert. With shoutouts to everyone from Nietzsche to Sesame Street, Janice Lee’s experimental novel is an energetic and enigmatic read.

[Charlie Eskew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up a version without color at AWP so I may have a different perspective than some in my reading but it was wonderfully written. The narrative was chaotic and full of substance, and I really found the mystery of it intriguing. Janice plays with a lot of forms in the telling of this novel that at times reads like a screen play, an epic poem and a cut of focused vignettes but was at all times engaging.

[Minnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very cerebral prose poetry. In theory the style in which this is written should underscore the complexity of themes such as alienation, otherness, colonialism, matriarchy, migration, etc. But the delivery falls a bit flat for me when there’s too much of the octopus involved. It feels a bit heavy-handed to interweave the octopus and the self together so often. In addition, the Cain/Abel allegory seems disjointed throughout.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

The flow in this pulls the reader in and churns them about in a way that is both ecstatic and menacing. It functions on so many levels, both highly cerebral and sub-lingual thought, poetic and powerful prose, narrative and de/reconstructionist, ornamental and intelligent. The prose is both entertaining and challenging. In short, excellent.

[Dallas Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hear that Beatles song in your head..”She’s so……heeeaaavvyy….

Existential, curious, Ken Kesey/aldous Huxley/-esque …
minus the self gratification for writing words.

Metaphors, mindlessness and mindfulness.

Poetry.

Blow your mind for a few weeks or longer and read this book.