PRAISE FOR ABODE

“No one disappears alone —” these linked poems are a pastoral freak-out of the repercussions of a morally tainted language lineage. Halfbelonging, wordnulled, nothingshaped: the human spore, “to people nearby worlds,” comes across as “slightly rotten fruits that would disappear faster than I could forget them.” Yet, with foresight and empathy, Jun-long Lee’s renewed commitment to this one solitary abode is within our reach.

WEYMAN CHAN, author of Witness Back at Me

Art is our attempt to distill the immortal from what is born, grows, and passes away. In this it is like faith, and the poem, a prayer to a constant. Jun-long Lee gives us the world from the other side of our longing for the eternal; his poetry relishes the infirmity of things, the realization that all boundaries are melting edges. It is praise for the invisibleunchanging (to borrow from Lee’s enactment of his poetic vision with two words and rejected spacebar). The pleasure of reading Abode is like that of eating the pear ripening in the bowl at just the right time.

RICHARD HARRISON, author of On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood

Something has happened to the world as we know it. We can no longer name the places where we once felt at home. We are no longer ourselves, even if some of us still have hair and nails. Beings slip into caves and under rotten leaves, find hidden nooks in which to breathe and shudder. Through Jun-long Lee’s unsettlingly lively series of poems, something new and potent is coming into being. I don’t know what it is and neither do you, but we will recognize it because we’ll have to. This book is a feathered and fleshy dream, so close it is almost but not quite human.

LARISSA LAI, author of The Tiger Flu