ED BOK LEE was raised in South Korea, North Dakota, and Minnesota. A former bartender, phys ed instructor, journalist, and translator, he earned an MFA from Brown University, teaches at Metropolitan State University, and has shared his work in journals, anthologies, at colleges, and on stages across North America, Europe, and Asia, as well as on public television and radio, and MTV.

His first collection, Real Karaoke People, was a national bestseller in poetry and the winner of a Many Voices Prize, an Asian American Literary Award (Members' Choice), and a PEN/Open Book Award.

Whorled is his second book of poems and prose.

from WHORLED

On the other side of the world, there is a language I have never heard
It is beautiful, and in this dying tongue, there are words for Love and God
that resemble Bread and Wing
Or another forest language in which Mother and Knife

equal Drawer and Sing
And Island Wood is somewhere Desert Milk
And Berry, elsewhere is a Door
And if you added up all these dying words, and the people who speak them

All their memories, histories, and lessons
All their gods, jokes, rituals, and recipes
If you learned and stirred them, over and again, until
each utterance became a star, a new footprint, the marrow of a poem—