Septuagenarian E-Book

Sherry Quan Lee

• Herausgeber: Modern History Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 56

Beschreibung

Septuagenarian: love is what happens when I die is a memoir in poetic form. It is the author's journey from being a mixed-race girl who passed for white to being a woman in her seventies who understands and accepts her complex intersectional identity; and no longer has to imagine love. It is a follow-up to the author's previous memoir (prose), Love Imagined: a mixed-race memoir, A Minnesota Book Award finalist.
Praise for Sherry Quan Lee's Septuagenarian
In Septuagenarian, Sherry Quan Lee accepts her own invitation to look at life in retrospect, but with a new lens. Pulling from and expanding upon her previous body of work, she examines the version of herself that was writing at that time. The dignity and fire of her seventy-three-year old gaze taking in snapshots of those selves...straightens my spine and gives me a vision for myself traveling today into my future septuagenarian.
--Lola Osunkoya, MA, LPCC
Sherry Quan Lee writes courageously to understand herself and the world. She uses rich language and her skills as a storyteller to focus her sharp lens on what it means to have a complex, sometimes complicated identity: becoming invisible as she ages, a history of passing unseen, love and sex, grieving and celebration. She ruminates on history, which repeats itself in the current moment and widens her lens to look at the bigger, global picture to tell truths in poems that tenderly hold memory, time, rituals, trauma, mothering, fear of death and love in many forms. Her poems offer deeply personal, intimate and perceptive insights and opportunities to reflect on what it means to truly live. It feels like I've taken the journey with her, and I'm wiser for it.
--Shay Youngblood, author of Soul Kiss and Black Girl in Paris
From Modern History Press

Leseprobe

Septuagenarian: Love is What Happens When I Die

Copyright © 2021 by Sherry Quan Lee. All Rights Reserved.

ISBN 978-1-61599-568-4 paperback

ISBN 978-1-61599-569-1 hardcover

ISBN 978-1-61599-570-7 eBook

Published by

Modern History Press

5145 Pontiac Trail

Ann Arbor, MI 48105

Tollfree 888-761-6268        [email protected]

Fax [phone]        www.ModernHistoryPress.com

Distributed by Ingram Group (USA/CAN/AU), Bertram’s Books (UK/EU)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lee, Sherry Quan, 1948- author.

Title: Septuagenarian : love is what happens when I die / Sherry Quan Lee.

Description: Ann Arbor, MI : Modern History Press, [2021] | Summary: "Septuagenarian is a poetic memoir of the author's journey from being a mixed-race girl who passed for White to being a woman in her seventies who understands and accepts her complex intersectional identity; and no longer has to imagine love"-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021008925 (print) | LCCN 2021008926 (ebook) | ISBN 9781615995684 (paperback) | ISBN 9781615995691 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781615995707 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Lee, Sherry Quan, 1948---Poetry. | Racially mixed women--Poetry. | Identity (Psychology)--Poetry. | LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3562.E3644 S47 2021 (print) | LCC PS3562.E3644 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008925

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008926

What must I give more death to today,in order to generate more life?

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Dedication

I Blame It on Education

Knowledge makes me more aware, it makes me more conscious. ‘Knowing’ is painful because after ‘it’ happens I can’t stay in the same place and be comfortable. I am no longer the same person I was before. —Gloria Anzaldúa

My world on fire!

Kindling: Maria Damon, Edén Torres, Linda Hogan,Nellie Wong, Nikki Giovanni, David Mura;

Cave Canem & Asian American Renaissance.

I keep a heart full of poems burning.

Know where you’ve been, but don’t live in the past. Know where you are going…but the most important thing is to know who you are.

—Shay Youngblood

Contents

Love Imagined

Exorcism

Night Tremors

Rite of Passage

Because She Is Old

Genealogy

What Preceded Today

A History of Separation

Separation Preceded Me

A History of Sexual Relations

China Doll

History Won’t Win

Guns in White Rooms

Haunted House

Memoir

A History of Rape

I’m Not Letting Go of Desire

It’s Always About the Mother

Mother’s and Mine

Silence

It’s Always About the Mother

The Curse of Color

I Didn’t Know Men

I Have No Regrets, But Now

On the Eve of Her Seventieth Year

I Didn’t Need to Save the World

I Woke to This Place

Suddenly, My Life Is Private

I Have Yet to Learn How to Pray

I Have No Regrets, but Now

Where in the World

How to Live

It Sounds Like an Excuse to Me

Language Is a Difficult Way to Communicate

The Difference Between Opinion and Authority

Where in the World

But the Truth Is

Mirror Mirror

This Year Love

It’s About Love

The Boy and the Girl, the Man and the Woman

The Conversation

Who Are You?

Age Has Everything to Do With It

Septuagenarian

Oh, Holy God

Pandemic

Apocalypse Twenty-First Century

Love Is What Happens

Obituary

Morning Glories

And When I Die

Found Poem

The World Is Heavy

Writing Exercise

Afterword

A Crown of No Regret

Love Imagined

One doesn’t have to imagine love, if one is love.

Exorcism

Baby born silent, silent as her mother’s wound;

still waters. Not a wave. Not a storm.

Mother was not ripe or willing.

Parthenogenesis. Father worked nights.

Sister was ten months old(er).

Silence. Invisibility. A small room to be born in.

Possessed, I held my breath, hoping death.

******

My Chinese father was absent, invisible.

Did he see me in my mother’s image and disappear?

Did he fear the afterbirth, smell the placenta?

Did he want my mother to stop loving him?

Did he want the baby girls not to be born?

Father ran through my veins like the money he spent gambling.

Was a blue-beaded bracelet what he had bet on; bet against

the girl baby, bet against me.

Mother never wore pink—or black.

******

I rose to the occasion from my own need to be born.

I couldn’t swim, but I didn’t drown.

My mother rode the river well;

I cursed and stomped and sank.

Death frequent.

mouth closed, legs open

I rose to be pinched and prodded, pushed and pulled,

cradled and craved—devoured.

I rose to see snakes. Fear snakes. Eat snakes. Curse snakes. Seek snakes. Rely on snakes. Snakes bigger than a fist. Snakes smaller than a pinky finger.

And then I rose

to hear a womyn’s voice. I liked her tenor—

charismatic as a Baptist priest. I was infused

with pleasure; born again and again.

Daydreams and nightmares. Demons gone.

Night Tremors

A brown baby stretches

kicking white sheets

don’t hold me

to your American history

the large print puzzle has

landed on the floor nonsense

someone says, the questions

and the answers are always the same

but, baby can’t sleep

pulls blankie over her head

historylives in her bed.

The weight a child wears

bears so much room for sadness.

Every morning, a woman searches

for answers to a difficult puzzle

for a man who isn’t there, a life

that isn’t hers, a story that repeats;

sheets made of yesterday

that smell like sorrow, past

dream and nightmare.

Rite of Passage

To imagine love is to believe love exists. To imagine love is to see between the lies—the truth that must be written. —Sherry Quan Lee

I think amidst all this terror I am alone

as I journey through this shroud toward love.

I hustle past the blues towards

jazz, a mixing of sky of bird

of thunder of flight;

fear ebbs and flows

hand to mouth

safety always a concern.

I can’t see within the skin, the bones, the blood

of my body—the fear of my own nature distant

like the galaxy not yet reached.

Sometimes it frightens me, not knowing how I will die.

I’m not afraid of when;