Pulling details from the fierce peculiarities of everyday life, these plainly spoken, courageous poems chronicle the life of an Asian American woman straddling two cultures. At a crossroads of family history and present time, the poems grapple with conflict, failure, and limits that are ultimately transcended and resolved-through acceptance, love, fate, and the raw power of poetry itself-into a wild happiness. The poems also celebrate the poet's source of strength, her great love for her grandmother: a wise, Buddhist fortune-telling midwife/seamstress.

"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

"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

"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 Forche

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