Description

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Acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee offers a revelatory volume of ecstatic poems that search out divine voices in the silences of life, love, and death.

“The poet of rapture and tenderness” (Major Jackson, American Poets), Li-Young Lee speaks these poems with the intimacy and primacy of a whisper, as if from a lover to a beloved, or a believer to God. Each poem in The Invention of the Darling is a mysterious conjunction of spirit and matter, movement and stillness, the divine and the mundane, the sacred and the forbidden. They yearn for holistic union with The Beloved, every sentence another name for The Beloved, every poem another way to say “I love you.” Forged in awe of life and love, these poems emerge from the unlit depths of our earthly, material desires and our deepest fears of mortality.

About the Author

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Li-Young Lee’s verse has earned numerous honors, including a Lannan Literary Award, a Paterson Poetry Prize, and an American Book Award. Lee lives in Chicago.

Praise For…

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Countless gorgeous details provide, in poem after poem, distinct delights.
— Dan Chiasson - The New Yorker

[Lee] challenges readers to think and to feel more deeply.
— Elizabeth Lund - Washington Post

Few poets write like Li-Young Lee . . . facing the biggest and broadest questions head-on. . . . Fewer still ask these questions so well, and so movingly
— Craig Morgan Teicher - Los Angeles Times

[Li-Young] Lee’s elegance transports us into the aspirations of yearning.
— David Biespiel - American Poetry Review

Delight[s] in revelations that are holy and intimate. . . . [Lee’s] wisdom situates itself in a fresh way.
— Derek JG Williams - Rumpus

[Lee’s work] ground[s] the mysteries of existence in the plain imagery of the everyday.
— Deborah Shapiro - Chicago Magazine

Li-Young Lee’s [poems] tackle love and violence with equal curiosity
— Chicago Review of Books