Praise
"Through Priscilla Lee's Wishbone, we enter a world both magical and harrowing, where the barracudas are melancholy and porcupines are kept as pets, a world in which a firing squad and America are a telegram apart. Seldom are we blessed with a first book as poignant and absorbing as this one is, as street-pure, as wise."
— Carolyn Forché
"Priscilla
Lee's wonderful Wishbone draws together cultures and varied experiences
to form
a mature wisdom. A sensuous intelligence of body and mind
helps to
unite the
sacred and profane, and a tension is created in these poems that
surprises and
pleases. This young poet's words dance within her well controlled,
provocative
images—a distilled passion that takes little for granted in this
imaginative,
observed arena of chance and honed design. Wishbone is bold and tender,
shaped
out of classical mythologies and everyday life into an earned beauty we
can
trust."
— Yusef Komunyakaa
"In
Wishbone, Priscilla Lee mixes Kuan Yin and Christmas
lights, shark fin dumplings and shots of tequila, the sound of mah jong
tiles and slashing
punk-rock guitar riffs.... Lee patrols the
borders of experience with a
keen
eye and ear for the stories of those who, like Lee herself, perpetually
cross
back and forth between past and present, fortune and
accident, dreams
and
waking life. It's our good luck that from her relentless attention she
has
fashioned these rich, involving poems."
— Kim Addonizio
Her
name, the poet tells us, means ancient wisdom, which she delivers with
refreshing poise and maturity in Wishbone, her first volume of
poetry.
A second generation Chinese American,
Lee questions the limitations of writing
only the
"cross cultural experience." Nonetheless, she is proud of her
heritage and her work reflects a blend of cultures
and beliefs. Lee
explores a
spiritual world shaped by myth and magic and memory. Playful and
sensuous,
sardonic and bittersweet, her poems are a journey of
self-discovery-reflections
on sexuality, family, ethnicity. "I love the act of giving shape to
desire, the inexplicable light that lets us look into the
secrets of
others," she says. Sometimes profane, sometimes profound, these poems
provoke and enchant, always inhabited by a sense of Lee's revealing
presence.
— Virginia Quarterly Review
"[B]racing
energy and unsentimentality make WISHBONE... a
rewarding ride. The book is worth buying just for "Peel," a riff on
her Chinese and American names." It's a memoir of a girl
trying to hold
on
to the part of herself that comes from her grandparents' Chinese
culture while
living out her desires and ambitions, healthy and not-so, as a
young
independent woman in San Francisco. The tension is palpable and
exciting. For
example, in "Offering," the poet wants to give her lover, "the rock and
roll star in black
high-tops" a statue of Kuan Yin. Her
grandmother retorts, "Kuan Yin is not
given as a gesture, even her name is holier/ than the
ocean's thunder.
Why do
you give him this blessing? His nose/ is like a knife. He will have a
short
life, eating wind and/ coughing up bitterness."
In
"Chinese Girl in the Mirror" she mocks her English teacher's praise
of her "distinctly/ Asian voice" and tells off a friend who
"asked me/ whether my family would consider/ going back to
China/ if
the
Communists/ were overthrown . . . my grandfather came/ to build the
railroads/
and what did his family ever do/ to make him feel/ more
American than
me."
—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review