I'm working on finishing a lyric memoir with my grandmother and a full-length poetry collection about The Pacific Theater. Any donations here would allow me to work less and spend more time with my books. Much love!
Soffee Lee 李威夷 was catfished! by a financial aid package to Minnesota. When not white knuckling through white people around white bear lake, Soffee enjoys squirreling away perilla leaf kimchi onggis, dipping Culver’s Cheese Curds into the Broccoli Cheddar Soup, and peregrinating very unaffordable, hotgirl houses on Zillow. Too powerful, Soffee accidentally manifested the pandemic by publishing a sonnet corona, SP溢LL, which can be bought at tammyjournal.com. Soffee is a quintuple! Leo and her problematic fave is 양념통닭.
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Poetry is a genealogy grounded in generosity. Every poem I write is a temple of love letters for my grandmother, and her grandmother, and hers'. My grandmother, Lee Teng, grew up in Kaohsiung, Taiwan at the peak of Japanese Ultranationalism and Empire in the late 1930s. As an indigenous, Amis woman who lay witness to rape, torture, and genocide, she always told us that documenting the past is the means of writing the future. Beyond fluent in Japanese, she always spoke in poetry. One of her favorite things to say was: 「実るほど頭を垂れる稲穂かな。」Translation: The boughs that bear most hang lowest. As grains of rice grow on the stalk, the stalk bends, as if it is expressing gratitude for the universe. Similarly, as humans, the more knowledge we amass, the more humble we become, bowing our heads to the world we live in. My head has yet to touch the ground, though I hope it gets there one day. In the meantime, I will write the grains of rice.
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