Ardor

Poetry. ARDOR is a book-length poem comprised of lucid dreams, letters, and prayers with the sensual feminine awareness of C.D. Wright, the radiant spirituality of Fanny Howe, the playful erudition of Anne Carson, and the linguistic play of Myung Mi Kim. Ardor employs ecstatic utterances, linguistic migrations, silences, and women's voices in a feminine consciousness lingering on the mystery of love and glossolalia, speaking tongues in the context of a lyric postmodern aesthetic. Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her chapbook, God's One Hundred Promises, received the Swan Scythe Press Prize. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she lives and teaches on the West Coast. ARDOR is the first of three books by Karen An-hwei Lee that Tupelo has committed to publishing.

Central to this poetic cycle is an ethereal fugue of women's voices: old and young, remembered and forgotten. Acutely intimate and sensual verse articulates the complexity and wit of feminine consciousness and yet imbues this collection with a warmth and elegance that is irrefutably original and compelling.

Karen An-hwei Leeis the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Brown University and a PhD in literature from the University of California, Berkeley, where she also received the Eisner Prize. She lives and teaches on the West Coast.