Septuagenarian by Sherry Quan Lee: Featured Poem/Inspiration

Hello, friends! Today I have the pleasure of welcoming Sherry Quan Lee to the blog to celebrate the release of her new poetry collection, Septuagenarian. Sherry is here today to share a poem and its inspiration. Enjoy!

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The World Is Heavy

One doesn’t have to imagine good and evil amidst

all this terror.

Sadness, the bones and the blood surrender

but, we can make a difference we are all somebody

we are not on the backs on the backs on the backs

of sorrow

that preceded

head separated from body

body separated from country

family separated

love guarantees memory    

guns in white rooms the ghost

of a man an unholy ghost trying to rewrite the story

what if what if what if asking the questions is [not] enough?

sometimes madness

I feel like a boxer punching  the world

is heavy that’s when the silence is broken

not with words but with images  children

didn’t know what to make of the bickering

children got lost in the silence suffering;

the father the mother the siblings gone

a newspaper headline.

To the wicked and the wise there is a difference

between opinion and truth, a space where

freedom is clearly not where in the world  we are

divisive and our lives are at risk.

Tolerate is a difficult word. Racism, white men

with assault rifles. Death

is temporary.

History implodes on a regular irregular heartbeat

like a sorcerer reads palms this is love choking on air

ready to survive   pedestals 

collapse amidst a pandemic       

as I sip my morning coffee the heart/broken

is what saves us. The charade is over

this year. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

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How “The World is Heavy” Came to Be” and a Challenge to the Reader

January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, death—lies. A culmination of four frightful years. How, as a poet, can we respond? We could use the fast and flowing media coverage to write a found poem rearranging and reformatting what has already been written by journalists, by reporters, by politicians. Or, we can turn to our own writing.

Using only text from Septuagenarian: love is what happens when I die, I randomly chose words and phrases and strung them together. What might be hidden if we break apart the whole? Have I, unknowingly, moved beyond the personal—have I entered the world?

I discovered within my memoir of verse that I was saying more than I had said, that for me the personal continues to be political, and all things are temporary. The memory of what has preceded me implodes and love is my act of survival.

Use words and phrases from what you have previously written and find a poem. Perhaps you will discover what you didn’t know you knew. It may not, at first, make sense, yet it will.

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About Septuagenarian

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.

Buy on Amazon

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About the Author

Sherry Quan Lee, MFA, University of Minnesota; and Distinguished Alumna, North Hennepin Community College, is the editor of How Dare We! Write: a multicultural creative writing discourse. Her most recent book, Love Imagined: a mixed race memoir, was a 2015 Minnesota Book Award Finalist. Previous books include: Chinese Blackbird, a memoir in verse; How to Write a Suicide Note: serial essays that saved a woman’s life; and a chapbook, A Little Mixed Up.

Quan Lee was a selected participant for the Loft Literary Center Asian Inroads Program, and later was the Loft mentor for the same program. Previously, she was the Writer-to-Writer mentor for SASE: The Write Place, at Intermedia Arts. Also, she was the 2015-2016 Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series poetry mentor. Visit her blog.

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To learn more about Septuagenarian or to follow the tour, please click the button above.

Thank you, Sherry, for being my guest today, and congratulations on your new release!