At a time of intensifying migration patterns and heightened nationalisms, Asterism, the first full-length poetry collection of Ae Hee Lee, recipient of the 2022 Dorset Prize,offers a very personal exploration of transnational identity—one thatresists territorial and single-root models and that refuses the confinement of individuals within rigid nationality frames. For Lee’s identity itself cannot be simplified and circumscribed under a monolithic citizenship, culture, or language: born in South Korea, she was raised in Peru and has been living for a decade in the United States. Her language followed the same itinerary from Korean to Spanish to English. In the very first poem of the collection, “Self-Portrait as Portrait,” the speaker thus depicts herself (or rather her selves) as “a geese of three wings.”
This first self-portrait introduces an investigation of selves from which a poly-centric, fluid, and expansive model of identity emerges. In Lee’s case, identity appears as an asterism, a dynamic between three centers that roughly corresponds to the three parts of the collection: first, her Korean inheritance and the immigration of her parents to Peru, then her mixed Korean-Peruvian identity and her own move to the United States, and finally her settling in the USA. Each part also includes self-portraits (as “mother,” “I,” and “sister”), and self-studies (through “daily sustenance,” “homes,” and “prefixes”) that denote the complexity of transnational identities always “broken and full,” as the last line of the poem “Inheritance :: Invocation” suggests.
Belonging for a transnational is indeed problematic. One is always somewhat split, somewhat other, and Lee’s collection invites the reader into a quest for this otherhood, through poems that her attentive diction, humor, and surprising turns render, tender and intimate. There is for the transnational individual a necessity to embrace one’s own others, which starts by learning “how to be a foreigner” as expressed in “Self-Portrait as Mother.” Belonging takes the shape of inhabiting this otherhood of self, which the speaker explores through the body that eats (“In each country I call home, I eat my way into belonging”), the body that dwells (“at each point of entry—rename / my departures into returns”), and the body that speaks (“Learn from words. Words know that they cannot be restricted to a single meaning, and that their many meanings become their history and identity”). Through the collection, belonging thus appears as an embodiment of the composite that resists assimilation into a clear, one-centered identity.
Language in Asterism also participates in this de-centering (or poly-centering) through line-breaks, the use of Korean and Spanish, two poems of “(Dis)ambiguation,” and even mistranslations, as the poet confesses in an interview by Gabriela Souza for The Rumpus: “Everything can be a center if we let it. It’s the same with language. That’s why there are a couple of moments where I don’t translate or sneakily mistranslate.” Notably as well, the footnotes written in verses displace the center of gravity of the prose poem “Self-Study through Daily Sustenance.” In doing so, it reverses the usual order in which narrative footnotes explain poetry lines. The verses, sparser and more elusive, like the transnational identity, suddenly become a tool of contextualization.
Lee’s collection could exemplify Édouard Glissant’s idea of Relation, “a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and in errantry” (Poetics of Relation, University of Michigan Press, 1997). This “relation identity” in Asterism is a dynamic relation between three centers that reminds that we all are made of others and only grow by embracing others. The collection ends with a prelude—that is, what precedes light. Let’s heed its message for embrace of the others, inside and outside of us, and towards light. In these times of division and alienation, Asterism is a moving and important collection.
