“The Embrace of lush / unfamiliar arms,” a Review of Ae Hee Lee’s Asterism

In her debut poetry collection, Asterism, Ae Hee Lee writes, “The Napa cabbages inside are as wide / as my childish hips—rare in Trujillo, rare like Korean pepper flakes / my mother has been saving by mixing them with aji panca.” Her mother intuitively mixes and matches food and flavors from Peru and Korea. Lee—born in South Korea, raised in Peru, and now living in America—moves through this cultural mixture in her collection published before the current immigration-policy maelstrom. Little within the content of these poems is rooted or fixed. Her poetry, sharp yet unsettled, shifts with energetic purpose while her spatial awareness thrives in play, metaphor, and poetic forms. Nothing remains still; in the collection’s middle, Lee concludes, “There’s no such thing as an immovable object.” There are trips to Chicago, Trujillo, Korea, and Wisconsin (her mom’s visit), as well as poetry involving foods from various locations and cultures. Her attentive poetry echoes a migrant identity that breaks down and reassembles, struggling between fluidity and fixity both in subject and in enacting this tension within the text itself. Lee’s poetry opens up a space where readers, through this poetic stance, can connect more intimately and empathize with a migrant experience as an outsider.

Lee’s language and images are…