Ae Hee Lee’s poetry collection ASTERISM (Tupelo Press, 2023), winner of the 2022 Dorset Prize, is a masterclass in poetic form, linguistics, and complexity. A love letter to three different home countries, ASTERISM works through questions of place, personhood, and identity with empathy and curiosity. In an American political landscape teeming with unrest around the topic of (im)migration, Lee’s work resists conforming to a binary or even to a continuum, bringing us back to poetic roots of belonging with careful attention to scene, sense, and multi-linguistic sonics. ASTERISM relentlessly returns to a central throughline of home—in food, in self, in place, and in community, Ae Hee Lee’s voice shines through these poems allowing the reader to explore at their own leisure, to take pleasure in the intersections and complexities inherent in this collection even as meanings and conclusions tangle, come undone, and crumble to pure sensation in the process.

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Jordan Kramarsky: First of all, a happy belated one-year anniversary to your debut, ASTERISM! I wanted to first talk about the eponymous poem, excerpted below—an asterism refers not necessarily to a constellation, but to a series of stars that are part of a constellation, or a series or pattern of stars that are part of more than one. You work through this definitional absurdity throughout the work as a whole, and throughout this poem. In part, this definition creates wording for an oxymoronically common phenomenon—a whole being whose parts “belong” to more than one whole. Of course, this is an identity that we’ve named for celestial objects, but have not necessarily named for humans, and we see the speaker of your poems search for this word across three languages, across oceans, even across selves. Can you talk about the experience of writing around or about an ineffable human identity? How does the process of writing, or the use of language, change when we don't have the “right” word?

 

Tonight, I pray for wonder, 

innocent thread

without a needle, to play-

pretend embroidering

the missing

 links between a satellite’s

 silver, the dying

 borders of a sore, 

 an oxtail bone

 I once nibbled clean, 

 my grandmother’s braids

 turned tinsel after two wars, 

 words, aluminum, allure,

 alumbrar, aludir…
 

Ae Hee Lee: Thank you for reading ASTERISM with such care! I love how you refer to an asterism as an “identity,” one “we’ve named for celestial objects, but have not necessarily named for humans.” I’ve always been interested in the thought process behind how we name things. Oftentimes, we use names to distinguish, categorize, even set up intangible borders between selves, but when we name an entity thinking of their nature I think we are also recognizing in that other something that we, at the very least on a subconscious level, know about ourselves as well. After all, we all are part of a system of relationships that cannot stand entirely independently from each other. So, while we might not have a name for people something akin to an asterism, by recognizing asterisms, we can choose to understand and accept such a way of existing. 

 

At the same time, Solmaz Sharif’s words from her book, Look: Poems, come to my mind: “It matters what you call a thing.” And what does the absence of a name tell us? Naming can be a point for connection, a way of forming a relationship with another, so an absence could indicate a lack of it. However, the act of naming is also often fraught with power dynamics, as sometimes a name is used to limit an identity or assert ownership. And to add yet another twist, I also asked myself, what if I were to see absence as a chance for expansiveness, an ongoing narrative. These thoughts reminded me that words and names can act the same way we think of organic living beings: unfixed, mutable, and that I would like to approach them as such in my own writing.

 

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JK: In reference to language again, I wanted to know more about the [dis]ambiguation poems (two of which can be found online here and here)—when we think about lexical disambiguation, we often throw around the phrase “sense of the word,” which strikes me as especially rhetorically accurate when thinking about your poetics. In this collection, the “sense” of the word feels uniquely based in taste, in the mouthfeel of speaking, eating, tasting, or consuming language. How does taste (literary, physical, or otherwise) inform your writing process? 

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AL: While the sounds attributed to a language are arbitrary to their meanings, I find it fascinating that somehow guava sounds like the taste of guava to me, and persimmon like a creature from a fairytale, persimmon, or in Korean, gam, bewilderingly a little sweeter and golden. I’ve pondered in circles about the question of whether one’s personal experience comes before the associations the mind concocts, or whether the mind influences the experience, only to understand that the question itself is a circular one.

 

Since I was a child, I became very conscious about the physicality of a word, especially within the English language. English was the third language introduced into my life, and it took a lot of effort and practice in a way that was different from how I learned Spanish and Korean, which was by immersion (living in Peru but speaking only Korean at home with my family). But English I learned by the book, literally. Repeatedly mouthing the words with keen awareness. I would carry around a little journal in which I simply jotted down words that I enjoyed popping into and rolling around my mouth to savor their shapes and textures. This is probably where it comes from: my writing process: I must chew each word slowly, with poetic intention. Everything tastes more vibrant when done with mindfulness.

 

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JK: Many of these poems are sorted thematically—one of the groups that I was struck by was the self-portrait poems, excerpted below. Identity obviously has a presence in these, but so does community as a self-definition, the ways in which we learn, or learn how to express who we are. In a beautiful Rumpus interview you did with Gabriella Souza, I was struck by you saying “everything can be a center if we let it,” and by how much the self becomes ironically decentralized in this series. Even the most individually-titled installment, “Self-Portrait as I,” quickly becomes a love poem, an ode to a couple. Of course, the egoist centralizing of the self is also an intrinsically Western sentiment in a lot of ways, and decentralizing the self can also be a decolonizing act—what was the process like of creating these self-portrait poems? Do you feel that they brought you closer to or farther away from a “sense” of self?

 

Aloneness hasn’t driven us

into pining for a life where we try to fit into a shoe box

of a country, and our differences haven’t made us

smaller in the squinting gaze of others. Here I promise

no love will end in assimilation. It’ll just not

end. Here I don’t wish us belonging. I wish us

the benediction of bell flowers and bees

and beloveds who’ll hum with us sleepy songs.

I wish us here and beyond this poem: here, sister, here.​

 

AL: The self-portrait poems started out by asking what might the self be without the others who loved and nurtured it, even those others we might not directly be acquainted with but who have touched our lives in invisible ways. That said, I would retort to myself, why this obsession with self-definition when that definition is ever changing, affected by people and places we met, haven’t met, and will meet?

 

I’m not sure if I could say if I was brought closer to or farther away from a “sense” of self, or even if my intention was one or the other by writing these self-portrait poems. However, I wanted to mimic the continual push and pull of that journey, like the movement of a wave that also splatters everywhere upon coming in touch with a rock or a visiting foot. To be present in that going rather than force myself towards a single direction.

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In the process, I found I was able to decentralize the self, and like you said, decolonize it from internalized notions of egoism, the capital “I” in the English language. I found it incredibly productive as a sort of exercise, something I would like to continually work on. 

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JK: So much of this collection defies dichotomy—the trilingualism, the [dis]ambiguations, and the generosity these poems hold in the in-betweens, allowing both speaker and reader to see the ups and downs [and more importantly the neither up nor down, or the both] in the experiences of movement, displacement, and finding new homes. There can be so much fear and grief in leaving a home, in the experience of displacement, and the myriad xenophobic bureaucracies of “relocation,” especially with rapidly changing immigration politics. And also, as many of your poems describe, there is such an expansive universe of opportunity in the borderless ways that this earth offers itself to us. In “A Study Through Homes,” you write, 

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A Venezuelan couple moves into our neighborhood. They share their story with me, why they migrated to Peru: the inflation, their hunger and fear, their love—they are relieved they can send money back to their families. They say they miss the soup their grandmother used to make, the sleepiness after eating it, the magic. When I ask what’s home for them, they say home is a fist that dreams.

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I’m curious about how these increasingly politicized ideas of country, home, or even place play out through ASTERISM—how do the politics of place help, hinder, or simply contribute to this series of poems that expands beyond borders?

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AL: When I was younger, I was enamored with the universal, seeing it as something that bridged cultural gaps. But the more I read and traveled, I started questioning it. Even what we called nowhere was a somewhere, and so what we deemed universal was really a popularized standard decided by the politics of a particular, oftentimes to the advantage of hegemonic powers. This became one of the reasons why I sought to organize the poems in ASTERISM, foregrounding the idea of polycentrism.

 

I also had in mind how connotations work, how they are telling about our experiences in the world. Of course, individual connotations can vary, but these too tend to exist in relationship with associations accepted by larger communities. Growing up, and even today to a large extent, I noticed the kind of connotations that tend to accompany the word and narrative of “(im)migration” are those of trauma, fear, and discrimination. Hope, resilience, and determination were there too, but feelings of alienation are overwhelming by far. While acknowledging this reality, I wondered what it would be like if ours were a world in which “(im)migration” brought up thoughts of awe, joy, and expansiveness rather than bureaucracy and anxiety. I wanted to explore a belonging that goes beyond being discoursed in terms of one or other, insider or outsider.

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