Sherry Quan Lee, MFA, University of Minnesota, is the author of Chinese Blackbird, a memoir in verse; How to Write a Suicide Note, serial essays that saved a woman's life; Love Imagined: a mixed-race memoir (a Minnesota Book Award Finalist); and, the picture book And You Can Love Me a story for everyone who loves someone with ASD-published by LHP, Modern History Press, Ann Arbor, MI. She is the editor of How Dare We! Write: a multicultural creative writing discourse, an anthology finding home in university writing classrooms.
I've been reading Sherry Quan Lee's work for almost thirty years
and her voice keeps getting stronger, more urgent, deeper. In
Septuagenarian, she continues to write out of her past, "the
Black/Chinese/girl passing for white," but the range of her voice
is wider now, both inward and outward and it's anchored by a wisdom
that can only be achieved through struggle and time. This is a
significant, heartfelt work, one that will help readers to
understand not only the author and her life, but also America
itself--what we have been, what we are and, hopefully, what we
might become. --David Mura, author of A Stranger's Journey: Race,
Identity & Narrative Craft in WritingSeptuagenarian by Sherry Quan
Lee, is a book that answers, in many different ways, the question
posed in one of the poems contained within: "What does surrender
look like?" Surrender looks like passion, like the banishment of
shame, like truth telling. The narrator is not afraid of death, but
embraces the inseparability and magnitude of opposing forces: "The
world is a large body of terror where good and evil coexist, and
each of us is responsible." Quan Lee's bold language makes space
for living within impos-sibilities. It is a book that maps, often
with aching beauty, many of the author's passions, desires, grief
and the circularity of life at seventy, "I have lost so many people
over time, but at seventy long-term memory brings them back, both
the wicked and the wise...story ends where it begins." -- Sun Yung
Shin, author of Unbearable SplendorSeptuagenarian is a poignant
retrospective covering seven decades of Sherry Quan Lee's life,
culminating in 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this
collection, which blends new work with poems published in her
previous books, Quan Lee reckons with invisibility-a mixed-race
woman who was raised white/ "a gray-haired specter" "the critics
ignore." The pain and frustra-tion caused by the pervasive,
divisive effects of generational trauma on herself and her family
are no longer obstacles, and love is no longer imagined-and the
world at large explored. --Carolyn Holbrook, author of Tell Me Your
Names and I Will TestifySherry Quan Lee writes with a purity of
intention. She has no interest in certain kinds of poetics that
conceal, or only honor, adornment. She has her gaze on the long
sweep of her personal history. She reflects on old wounds, key
mistakes and certain joys. She pushes against cliched thinking or
feeling. She is hard on herself, in these poems, in ways few poets
are. She honors the complicated narratives of race, of being
female, of living a long life and works to discern the point of it
all. I've read and taught Sherry Quan Lee's work for a very long
time now and am grateful for this new collection .--Deborah Keenan,
author of ten collections of poetry and a book of writing ideas,
from tiger to prayer
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