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The Sky Isn't Blue
"To read Janice Lee’s new book, The Sky Isn’t Blue, is to remember. Not major events or turning points in life, even though she is writing after a huge one in her life, but remembering moments, textures, sounds, pauses. The air that touched my skin once as I walked home. The sound of dust touching glass. How there was blue once above me when I looked up. It makes me remember that my life is about spaces—of things as large as the sky that envelopes me and of the more intimate, like the space that is my body. The book disappeared as it became each second ticking away in my life, reminding me that I will not be able to save it nor will I ever be able to forget. "
–Chiwan Choi, author of Abductions
“Sensual, intellectual, bold enough to extend Bachelard’s seminal Poetics of Space and prod Nelson’s exquisite Bluets, Janice Lee’s The Sky Isn’t Blue is a series of ‘dialogues with the dead.’ These disconcerted essays observe our overrun absences—the monumental bleakness of the American West, the desert of the empty bed. Still, Lee’s frequently audacious declarations accompany a mournful narrative of loneliness. The ‘you’ Lee addresses throughout often seems the author’s lover, gone, and thus us—not with Lee, but with her collection of lustrous melancholy, an elegy for her mother and for the rest of us, who will fall to hard weather. For now, Lee’s built a space of 'brightly lit darkness' in which we can all gather, alone together.”
—Douglas Kearney, author of Patter
“In Janice Lee’s The Sky Isn’t Blue, her thoughtfully interrogative and raw turn towards intimacies elegantly weaves body, environment, and intellect together into a sensually theorized re-encounter. The attentive instance blooms into spiritual incantation. Gaston Bachelard, a phenomenologist of the imagination, becomes her Beatrice through this labyrinth of perception and insight. Through it all, Lee achingly demonstrates our shared human dilemma: of how we endure past tribulation, confusion, and despair. Her solution is to dwell in the dark blue ache of it, where she astoundingly discovers immense beauty. Lee’s meditative aphorisms diffuse a deeply atmospheric wisdom into us, like ‘the wound of expectation.’ And though it’s painfully true that ‘an inhabitation becomes an unlived one,’ Lee demonstrates that the proper reaction might best be to ruminate, to return, and to be transformed in that return... accomplishing a sensitivity and insight that magnifies. Isn’t that a central premise of our humanity?”
–Sueyeun Juliette Lee, author of Solar Maximum
“Janice Lee is a poet's poet, a writer's writer, a griever's griever, a human's human. The Sky Isn't Blue is a phenomenal work for a reader's reader—demanding us to be awake in this world.”
–Ali Liebegott, author of Cha-Ching!
–Chiwan Choi, author of Abductions
“Sensual, intellectual, bold enough to extend Bachelard’s seminal Poetics of Space and prod Nelson’s exquisite Bluets, Janice Lee’s The Sky Isn’t Blue is a series of ‘dialogues with the dead.’ These disconcerted essays observe our overrun absences—the monumental bleakness of the American West, the desert of the empty bed. Still, Lee’s frequently audacious declarations accompany a mournful narrative of loneliness. The ‘you’ Lee addresses throughout often seems the author’s lover, gone, and thus us—not with Lee, but with her collection of lustrous melancholy, an elegy for her mother and for the rest of us, who will fall to hard weather. For now, Lee’s built a space of 'brightly lit darkness' in which we can all gather, alone together.”
—Douglas Kearney, author of Patter
“In Janice Lee’s The Sky Isn’t Blue, her thoughtfully interrogative and raw turn towards intimacies elegantly weaves body, environment, and intellect together into a sensually theorized re-encounter. The attentive instance blooms into spiritual incantation. Gaston Bachelard, a phenomenologist of the imagination, becomes her Beatrice through this labyrinth of perception and insight. Through it all, Lee achingly demonstrates our shared human dilemma: of how we endure past tribulation, confusion, and despair. Her solution is to dwell in the dark blue ache of it, where she astoundingly discovers immense beauty. Lee’s meditative aphorisms diffuse a deeply atmospheric wisdom into us, like ‘the wound of expectation.’ And though it’s painfully true that ‘an inhabitation becomes an unlived one,’ Lee demonstrates that the proper reaction might best be to ruminate, to return, and to be transformed in that return... accomplishing a sensitivity and insight that magnifies. Isn’t that a central premise of our humanity?”
–Sueyeun Juliette Lee, author of Solar Maximum
“Janice Lee is a poet's poet, a writer's writer, a griever's griever, a human's human. The Sky Isn't Blue is a phenomenal work for a reader's reader—demanding us to be awake in this world.”
–Ali Liebegott, author of Cha-Ching!
Paperback
Published March 11, 2016
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About the author
Janice Lee
49 books180 followersJANICE 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.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 27, 2016
Lee melds the cerebral with the visceral, emotional, and poetic in this one. It's intense, powerful in multiple ways simultaneously. It left me raw, but satisfyingly...if that makes any sense. In any event, it's good and it's strong and you should read it.
June 27, 2017
This book is almost hypnotic in the way after each physical location, the thoughts wonder from one idea and grow into reflections on loss, grieving, space and love. Even in its heaviest ideas, its most dense poetics, I could follow it without a headache. I slowed down just enough to follow the thoughts. sat in the white space for a while. I really enjoyed reading these pages, this bold collection of essays.
There's also lines from Elliott Smith in it, so there's that, too.
There's also lines from Elliott Smith in it, so there's that, too.
August 31, 2017
“If there ever was a city in which every inhabitant could tailor their existence and experience of that city completely, it is LA. Your LA is very different from my LA. My LA from a few years ago is different from my LA today.”
*
This poetic, evocative work by Korean-American writer Janice Lee will make you nostalgic for the Los Angeles you’re in now, the Los Angeles you want the city to be, and the Los Angeles that never was.
*
This poetic, evocative work by Korean-American writer Janice Lee will make you nostalgic for the Los Angeles you’re in now, the Los Angeles you want the city to be, and the Los Angeles that never was.
May 28, 2016
This is a difficult book to assess, mainly because it doesn't present an accessible plot to hinge judgement on. Rather the tension is in the language itself, between description, events, expectations and musings. There is a kind of enchant and wonder in the narrative, and its discord with the narrative biography sits in an unnameable place. In that sense, Lee is pushing more towards an aesthetic statement than about a "story". Rather the attempt to integrate the common in its particularity with the human sense of loss is the "story". To some degree these musings are framed by very modernist leanings (such as quotes from Kandinsky about the "actuals" of spiritual manifestation in art and nature) but the overall experience is one of postmodern fragmentation. I am torn between liking the approach and feeling as though it is a cop out. Whitespace is one way to imply depth when the author can be lazy about not providing the reader any. Lee asks us to work harder than we would with a conventional story, but the work she has us do feels very unfocused. I am not sure where I am going. The subject matter may be problematic here, because the incongruity of the pieces she works with by themselves do not lend itself to a nameable coherency so the overall push is to explore the depth in experience that is yet unnamed and to some degree pretty original. This is okay, but at times I am not sure if Lee knows where she is going either, and it is that lack of trust on my part that makes reading this all the more problematic for me.
Overall its a very ambitious book. A very personal endeavor, one that would talk of a very basic awareness that unifies us, one that is found even in dogs. It does feel to me more like a transitional work than one that has sure footing though. But whether that is the case or not, is one for prosperity to decide, not for me.
Overall its a very ambitious book. A very personal endeavor, one that would talk of a very basic awareness that unifies us, one that is found even in dogs. It does feel to me more like a transitional work than one that has sure footing though. But whether that is the case or not, is one for prosperity to decide, not for me.
July 14, 2016
for me, reading this book was like hanging out with a good friend, willing to make profound observations of ourselves and the world, that mean everything and nothing at once.
Janice Lee is brilliant. What she presents in this collection is what I would call poetic personal essays, which detail a variety of topics including longing, loss, desire, space, location, writing, relationships (to other humans, to animals, to art, to memory, to location), and more.
The formatting of text at a glance is a bit disorderly, but is reflexive of its original intention of being published online. But more than that, is representational in the desire for more space, for more poignancy, and to be fluid. I think it really worked well.
Janice makes references all across the spectrum of media—from Dali's melting clocks, to Walter Kandinsky's "Concerning the Spiritual in Art", to T.V.'s Nashville, to the film Small Soldiers(!), to the floods of nostalgia when listening to Linkin Park's In the End, and more. I mean come on! Wow, what a spectrum! I think Janice Lee is hip with her references, and so intelligent.
This book is very introspective most of the time, and is written like no one was necessarily supposed to read it. I can relate to that. I loved the way she talks about writing, I loved the way she talks about herself in different contexts. This was a good collection.
Janice Lee is brilliant. What she presents in this collection is what I would call poetic personal essays, which detail a variety of topics including longing, loss, desire, space, location, writing, relationships (to other humans, to animals, to art, to memory, to location), and more.
The formatting of text at a glance is a bit disorderly, but is reflexive of its original intention of being published online. But more than that, is representational in the desire for more space, for more poignancy, and to be fluid. I think it really worked well.
Janice makes references all across the spectrum of media—from Dali's melting clocks, to Walter Kandinsky's "Concerning the Spiritual in Art", to T.V.'s Nashville, to the film Small Soldiers(!), to the floods of nostalgia when listening to Linkin Park's In the End, and more. I mean come on! Wow, what a spectrum! I think Janice Lee is hip with her references, and so intelligent.
This book is very introspective most of the time, and is written like no one was necessarily supposed to read it. I can relate to that. I loved the way she talks about writing, I loved the way she talks about herself in different contexts. This was a good collection.
February 14, 2017
Janice Lee is a fearless writer.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews