MARBLEHEAD – On Sunday, February 19th, the Poetry Salon will be devoted to the poems of Li-Young Lee. Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. (Sunday 2/19 – 2 p.m. – 4 p.m.) His father had been a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, and relocated the family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. In 1959, the Lee family fled the country to escape anti-Chinese
sentiment, and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the 
United States in 1964.
Lee attended the Universities of Pittsburgh and Arizona, and the State University of New York.
He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The City in Which I Love You and Rose,
which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. The Poet Gerald Stern has noted that
“what characterizes Lee’s poetry is a certain humility… a willingness to let the sublime enter his
field of concentration and take over, a devotion to language, a belief in its holiness.”
Lee’s poems often use narrative and personal experience or memories to launch their
investigations of the universal. Alex Lemon characterizes Lee’s voice as “poignant and potent,
filled with compassion and longing. His poems are laced with adoration and unadorned suffering
(at times, almost to a fault). And though they contain a few lines that have a certain slightness, an
almost childlike buoyancy, some of his deepest work can be found here. Vast spaces are opened
between poems about parents, food, war and immigration.”
Please join Marblehead Poet and Salem State University Professor Emerita Claire Keyes for a
lively discussion of Li-Young Lee’s poems. The Salon runs from 2:00 – 4:00 pm.
The Library’s monthly Poetry Salon is supported in part by a grant from the Marblehead
Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a
State agency.
The Abbot Public Library is located at 235 Pleasant Street, Marblehead, MA 01945. For
additional information, please call 781-631-1481 or visit www.abbotlibrary.org.
