The City in Which I Love You

by Li-Young Lee

Contents

I.
Furious Versionis

II.
The Interrogation
This Hour And What Is Dead
Arise, Go Down
My Father, In Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud
For A New Citizen Of These United States
With Ruins

III.
This Room And Everything In It
The City In Which I Love You

IV.

The Waiting
A Story
Goodnight
You Must Sing
Here I Am
A Final Thing

V.
The Cleaving

Genres: Poetry, Asian American, Nonfiction, Romance, Asian Literature, Adult, Family

89 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1990

About the author

Li-Young Lee is an American poet. He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His great-grandfather was Yuan Shikai, China's first Republican President, who attempted to make himself emperor. Lee's father, who was a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, relocated his family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. His father was exiled and spent a year in an Indonesian prison camp. In 1959 the Lee family fled the country to escape anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964. Li-Young Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport.

Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he began to develop his love for writing. He had seen his father find his passion for ministry and as a result of his father reading to him and encouraging Lee to find his passion, Lee began to dive into the art of language. Lee’s writing has also been influenced by classic Chinese poets, Li Bo and Tu Fu. Many of Lee’s poems are filled with themes of simplicity, strength, and silence. All are strongly influenced by his family history, childhood, and individuality. He writes with simplicity and passion which creates images that take the reader deeper and also requires his audience to fill in the gaps with their own imagination. These feelings of exile and boldness to rebel take shape as they provide common themes for many of his poems.

Li-Young Lee has been an established Asian American poet who has been doing interviews for the past twenty years. Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (BOA Editions, 2006, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll), is the first edited and published collection of interviews with an Asian American poet. In this collection, Earl G. Ingersoll asks "conversational" questions to bring out Lee’s views on Asian American poetry, writing, and identity.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

To me, this is trauma poetry. Each new pleasure in the poet’s life tied to either the political persecution that caused his family to flee Indonesia, or the broader atrocities of war.

His father is a central focus. Lots of catharsis poems.

Also his wife and child, always with some sort of violence at the periphery, like he’s bracing for inevitable plunder.

It’s beautiful language, but don’t go in expecting a lift.

What you should expect is to encounter that raw, biological force in us that keeps crawling forward, teeth bared to danger, toward some sandy-bottomed burrow or fire-lit cave to call home.

And when, in the city in which I love you,
even my most excellent song goes unanswered,
and I mount the scabbed streets,
the long shouts of avenues,
and tunnel sunken night in search of you....

That I negotiate fog, bituminous
rain ringing like teeth into the beggar's tin,
or two men jackaling a third in some alley
weirdly lit by a couch on fire, that I
drag my extinction in search of you....

Past the guarded schoolyards, the boarded-up churches, swastikaed
synagogues, defended houses of worship, past
newspapered windows of tenements, among the violated,
the prosecuted citizenry, throughout this
storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed
city I call home, in which I am a guest....

A bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I'm vexed to love you, your body

the shape of returns, your hair a torso
of light, your heat
I must have, your opening
I'd eat, each moment
of that soft-finned fruit,
inverted fountain in which I don't see me.

Book/Song Pairing: You (Keaton Henson, Derek Jacobi)

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this life, this is how
one must wait, past despair,
the heart a fossil, the minutes molten, the feet turned to stone.
[...]
And though I stopped waiting years ago,
I continue to wait.
Even now

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Because Rose is the first collection of poems by Li-Young Lee, it's only natural to assume that Lee's voice and stylistic preferences would undergo changes as he continued traveling the long road toward scholastic recognition; however, since Rose has gained considerable attention and become so frequently anthologized, Lee's sophomore attempt, The City in Which I Love You, is largely overshadowed. In fact, City seems almost pigeonholed by criticism for Rose, which spends much of its time exploring the author's personal history and categorical placement among other contemporary Asian-American poets. I don't think this kind of socio-economic geo-racial profiling is very helpful or essential to City's poems. Interesting but unnecessary.

Reminiscent of Rose perhaps in its rich yet murky symbolism, City's title poem for example is a new and significant development in Lee's technique--the speaker seems to be searching a dream for meaning, and where the old Li-Young might have simply discussed familial or physical love, the new Li-Young seems bent on trading the familiar small pings of sensuality for the larger pangs of longing. Likewise, he exchanges quiet meditation for a darker sort of surrealism. Through this, Lee seems more aware of the dangers of sentimentality and more intent on incorporating a deeper range of emotions to his poems.

By the by, whether a fan or not, read (or better yet, hear him read) "The Cleaving." It is an amazing piece of work.

[Q · Rating 5 out of 5]

There were two poems in this small collection I did not love and all the others I loved deeply, especially the title poem, 'A Final Thing', 'Goodnight', 'This Room and Everything in It', the first poem 'Furious Versions' and the final poem 'The Cleaving', which is a kind of hymn to a kind of face, a face like the poet's and maybe like mine:

I would devour this race to sing it,
this race that according to Emerson
managed to preserve to a hair
for three or four thousand years
the ugliest features in the world.

(Of course I immediately had to find the reference in Ralph Waldo Emerson.)

Lee uses tight bundles of perfect words which are such a pleasure to unravel, and a loose easy rhythm. There might be too much fear of death in this collection, but who doesn't fear death? I loved the sense of insignificance ('It was one year of fire/out of the world's diary of fires,') and desperation, and something approaching serenity:

And since we've not learned
how not to want,
we've had to learn,
by waiting, how to wait.

So reading this amplifies my own hunger and begins to console it.

[subaha · Rating 5 out of 5]

But I own a human story,
whose very telling
remarks loss.
The characters survive through the telling,
the teller survives
by his telling; by his voice
brinking silence does he survive.
But, no one
can tell without cease
our human
story, and so we
lose, lose.

the collection explores various themes from spirituality to love, but what gripped me the most was how the poet describes his relationship with his father. Those peoms that focused on his father and his family were the ones that really spoke to me.

"I didn’t make the world I leave you with"

My favourites have to be "With Ruins", "This Room and Everything in it" and "A Story".

Also mention of "Goodnight.” In this poem, Lee talks about sharing a bed with family, the cramped quarters and his wandering thoughts. The last lines read:
“There is no bottom to the night, no end
to our descent.
We suffer each other to have each other a while."

[Sunni · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book shook me. One of the best books of poetry I’ve read. In an interview with in The Sun, Lee quotes Yehuda Amichai saying, “every poem I write takes all of human history into consideration, all of the atrocities, all the good stuff, and it’s the last poem I’m going to write.” All of Lee’s poems feel like this too.

He also says something really interesting: “If a work of art lacks the presence of God, then it’s not even art to me. For me, the definition of poetry is very narrow, but then, my definition of God is very wide.”

Both of these statements sum up well how it feels to read Lee’s work.

[AB · Rating 4 out of 5]

bituminous
rain ringing like teeth into the beggar's tin,

[sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the thirty years since it's publication, "The City in Which I Love You" and Li-Young Lee has been well canonized in AsAm Lit—his poems are often used as epigraphs.

I don't like every single poem in this book. There are sections that I find uncomfortable or cringe-worthy or overdone. But what I do like—and that is the overwhelming majority–I love so much that I will actually never be okay again. Lee's language is singularly beautiful, and operates on the scale of an epic. He's fantastic with using repetition and tenses as a way to surprise the reader and suggest time, with finding words that should not work in context, but do. If you are an immigrant or the child of immigrants, this book is like a tidal wave.

Owing to the fact that it was published in 1990, it's a lot less "experimental" than poetry from the last 15 years or so—it's focused primarily on the manipulation of language and emotion rather than formatting, and that works very heavily in its favor. It's refreshing to just read something with beautiful language and powerful emotions, and be able to just feel it hit.

A selection of some of my favorite lines:

(p17) "Dark poplars toss, insinuate the sea." Insinuate the sea. Before this I did not know that the sea was something that could be insinuated, or that poplars could insinuate them, but now I do and that knowledge is devastating.

(p18) "It was half a year of sweat and fatal memory." Fatal memory—God, that's amazing.

(p26) "The night grows
miscellaneous in the sound of trees." The night growing miscellaneous—Lee is so good at those unexpected turns of phrase that seem to make so much sense.

(p29) "The old poem
birthing itself
into the new
and murderous century." This is a new and murderous century. Holy shit. How did he just capture that?

(p33) "We were diminished. We were not spared." Diminished. Brilliant.

(p35) "At this hour, what is dead is restless
and what is living is burning." Wow. That's all I can say.

(p39)
"Because my father walked the earth with a grave,
determined rhythm, my shoulders ached
from his gaze. Because my father's shoulders
ached from the pulling of the oars, my life now moves
with a powerful back-and-forth rhythm:
nostalgia, speculation."
This is genuinely incredible. The parallels between the images, generations. "Nostalgia, speculation"—isn't that all of living?


(p55)
"If I feel the night
move to disclosures or crescendos
it's only because I'm famished
for meaning; the night
merely dissolves."

There is so much more but I would be typing for ages. This book was like falling in love.

[vic]

the cleaving is still my fave literally who does it like li-young lee

[BHJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply astounding

[Greta Rase · Rating 5 out of 5]

Se merece las 5 tan solo por tener The cleaving, qué grandes poemas, hermosa casualidad venirme a topar con la poesía de este hombre cargada de perdida, dolor y esperanza. El tema migratorio esta muy presente, pero también lo familiar: su padre, su abuelo; el amor en su pareja y su hijo. Léanlo.

[thli · Rating 4 out of 5]

i’m through with memory


powerful collection of poetry that had me gutted.

[Alex Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Li-Young Lee's poetry excels at turning perspectives and perceptions on their heads. He has a way of building unlike ideas that coalesce into a uniformed whole. Some of the pieces were a little too narrative or a little too out there for me, but overall I really enjoy Lee's style. "The Interrogation" was a stand-out for me.

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I often say of Lee's work that I have never read a Li-Young Lee poem that I didn't like. The streak continues. His diction and imagery are unmatched in their strength, breath, and beauty. He clearly articulates his personal sorrows and the shared sorrows of his people, whoever they happen to be, family or community or greater humanity.

[Lyd Havens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really regretting not reading a collection by Li-Young Lee sooner. This was absolutely mesmerizing.

[tegan · Rating 4 out of 5]

a final thing has gutted me like a little fish actually

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Li-Young Lee is quickly becoming one of my favorite poets. “The City in Which I Love You,” “The Waiting,” and “The Cleaving” are my favorite poems from this one.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of poetry pretty much sums up Lee's beliefs in poetry, especially in lines like this from "The Room and Everything in It":

it had something to do
with death... it had something
to do with love.

In a guest lecture he gave more than seven years ago, Lee said that the only two subjects worthy of poetry are death and love, and this book encompasses poems that split those subjects pretty evenly, even by combining the two subjects into single poems. The book is divided into five sections, some with one or two long poems and others with about a half-dozen. To me, the strongest section of poems is IV, because those are the most complex and, therefore, the most interesting to me.

In fact, complexity rules this book of poems, as each poems leads to a place that the reader is pretty unlikely to guess. I think this is why I like him so much as a poet, because Lee never fails to surprise me with his unusual turns, usually towards the end of a poem. His lines also end in places that at first seem strange but make more sense as one continues to read. "The Waiting," overall, is my favorite poem from this collection.

Lee is always a worthwhile read, and I'm eager to peruse the other volume he wrote that still is waiting on the shelf for me.

[Emily Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not a fan of poetry. In fact, I would say that I avidly avoid and disdain all such practices of poetry. If I could destroy one art form in the world it would be poetry. Having said that, however, this is a FANTASTIC read. This was assigned in my Contemporary Literature class and I was dreading it throughout the class until we got to it. I skimmed through it at first... and then it got good. The entire book of poetry tell a full story all together. It is an autobiography in poems. They are not only good as a whole but they are good separately as well. This book is every genre in one, and I loved it!

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading the Songs of Solomon made the title poem that much more beautiful, intense, lively. I started by dog-earing a handful of pages so I could re-read my favorite, but quikly undid that action due to all of the poems being so beautiful.

[Aidan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Li-young Lee’s The City in Which I Love You took me by surprise, each poem mounting and receding, tracing his family’s dynamic tenderness and grief awake in his own blood. The writing is tight and bundled, honed on memory and lineage as they cyclically reappear in the speaker’s life, yet the work also contains so much largeness that it often sprawls out into philosophy. I was most caught and enamored by this balance Lee is able to achieve. It never dissolves into simplicity, never to obscurity. The lyric “I” comes across as both intensely personal and wildly abstracted. It’s actually astounding — he condenses so much of history and time into this book in a manner which, to me, is spoken exactly the way it should be. I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry that feels so effortlessly effortful, so perfectly imperfect. It just moves across the page as it must. Each poem thuds like it could be someone’s last words. So many of them brought me to tears.

And it means so much to me because I have a difficult time writing about my family. The interpretability of poetry means there is space, and ought to be space, for family members to extrapolate or assume I have bad intentions, that every critical focus of my gaze means I somehow can’t love them also. We are warned about the potential dangers of publicizing the family, how it might alienate or at least stretch your loved ones — but how it can also be a necessary thing. Everything Li-young Lee writes feels inherently necessary.

The concept of nothingness and reemergence thrums throughout these poems. “With Ruins,” I think, encapsulates so much of what the book is trying to do; it is “negotiating absences.” The speaker commands the “you” to “choose a ruin,” where “you can remember what you need to remember” — Li-young Lee asks this “you” to navigate the remnants of a scattered history and pump it through with your life, through with your memory. He implores you to place yourself, you “human thing,” into a context that also feels hollow. And this hollowness works on so many levels in this book, as it traces “our life and its forgetting.” Through meditations on his father’s murder to leaving his country, Lee is preoccupied with lost artifacts, destructions, swirling grief; however, he also views these destructions as opportunities for something new, something you must enter into and transform. This is where the second half of the poem sings — he implores the “you” to bring their “melancholy,” their hurts, to the ruin, and assures them that “there are no neighbors to wonder / who you are.” The ruin offers an intimate space, a real and metaphysical remnant of a bygone time from which something generative can still occur. Even amidst all these cancellations, all the inconsistencies of what an immigrant body is worth, there is something to be shaped between two people. Further, the final two lines, “It’s mine. / It’s all yours,” collects the “you” with the “I,” creating meaning, something important, as it is springing from the rubble.

Togetherness teeters just above total annihilation in this book. As memory fades, as fathers and generations and countries pass, things lose their meaning — Lee creates so much chaos by dissolving the past and letting it haunt the present. Yet what is important to Lee is the meaning that can be created without or despite the violence of one’s past, and that meaning lies between people. “This Room and Everything In It” is a great example; in this poem, the speaker fights against losing memory, losing their connection to their subject. They try a multitude of strategies to remember, mostly by associating small details about this person with larger ideals, letting each scent and sound “stand for…ideas of love.” The line that leaps off the page for me in the context of the collect is “your closed eyes my extinction” — in this one line, Lee makes real the power and importance of witnessing in the book. As an immigrant, running forever from a crumbling past, from the pain and heartache that consumes the road you’ve been running on, what matters is still being seen. It is not grandiose, or loud. It is a quiet seeing. It is in the gaze and closeness of another that keeps him from “forgett[ing] [his] idea.”

I also wanted to briefly mention “The Waiting,” because this poem broke me open in such a beautiful way, and it has everything to do with quietness and gentleness. As I witness these two people and their child laying in bed, navigating their wants and fears, pressed together in the same bed, I am caught most of all by the straightforwardness of Lee’s language — the form is just there, nothing fancy, nothing even to talk about. But yet that unobtrusive quality to the form allows me to just fall into it, and fall so instantly. I love the switch from the “you” and “I” to “years ago,” to this family huddled together, and in this remembrance I feel as if Lee is creating a new lineage, a new history, founded through a kind of tenderness that shines with such unbelievable clarity and grace.

If it’s not obvious, this collection absolutely skinned my world like an orange and it will go down as one of the most impactful and momentous experiences with poetry I’ve ever had.

[Bookish]

​I’m revisiting one of my favorite books of poetry this week because it’s National Poetry Month. ​I first read Li Young Lee’s The City in Which I Love You when I was in graduate school. I fell instantly in love with the book, and especially the title poem and “This Room and Everything in It.” The poems are accessible without being simplistic and now, nearly 30 years later, I easily recall how moved I was the first time I read these poems and how the hair on the back of my neck rises again as it did then with the final stanzas of “The City in Which I Love You”:

Straight from my father’s wrath,
and long from my mother’s womb,
late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who’s experienced
neither heaven nor hell,

my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter

the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain. —Myf (https://www.bookish.com/articles/book...)

[Lancelot · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Lie still now
while I prepare for my future,
certain hard days ahead,
when I’ll need what I know so clearly this moment.

I am making use
of the one thing I learned
of all the things my father tried to teach me:
the art of memory.

I am letting this room and everything in it
stand for my ideas about love
and its difficulties.

I’ll let your love-cries,
those spacious notes of a moment ago,
stand for distance.

Your scent, that scent
of spice and a wound,
I’ll let stand for mystery.

Your sunken belly
is the daily cup of milk I drank
as a boy before morning prayer.
The sun on the face of the wall is God,
the face I can’t see, my soul,

and so on, each thing standing for a separate idea,
and those ideas forming the constellation
of my greater idea.
And one day,
when I need to tell myself something intelligent about love,

I’ll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it:
My body is estrangement.
This desire, perfection.
Your closed eyes my extinction.
Now I’ve forgotten my idea.
The book on the windowsill, riffled by wind . . .
the even-numbered pages are the past,
the odd-numbered pages, the future.
The sun is God, your body is milk . . .

useless, useless . . .
your cries are song, my body’s not me . . .
no good . . .
my idea has evaporated . . .
your hair is time, your thighs are song . . .
it had something to do with death . . .
it had something to do with love.”

[KRZ · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is true that Li's poems can be cloying. I have found this to be especially true of his newest collection. But the titular poem of this book is on so high a level that it alone earns this collection 5 stars.

[Abigail Ceremuga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Profound and chilling and thought-provoking.

[Kaylee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you so much. I love you

[Thai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my god

[Carrotcakie · Rating 4 out of 5]

the writing about his father was so moving to me - immigrating to the US, shared trauma...
some poems: This Room and Everything in It, The City in Which I Love You, Here I Am, and The Cleaving (The Cleaving is truly remarkable).
~~
"His love for me is like his sewing:/ various colors and too much thread,/ the stitching uneven. But the needle pierces/ clean through with each stroke of his hand" -35
"I never believed that the multitude of dreams and many words were vain" -57

[William Zhuang · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no bottom to the night,
no end to our descent.

We suffer each other to have each other a while.

[clémence eve 💌 · Rating 5 out of 5]

probably one of my favourite collections of all time, i picked it up at the library last year before the summer holidays because i liked the title. fell in love with it and li-young lee, cannot recommend it enough if you like good poetry. short and sweet and everything in between <3