Review by Aiden Hunt
“I never knew if I was trying to win my mother’s heart or God’s when I wrote poems,” says Li-Young Lee in his new chapbook, I Ask My Mother to Sing. Both figures feature prominently in the slim volume that collects mother-themed poems from each of Lee’s six collections since 1986, along with seven new poems. It’s the latest in a series of “new and collected” chapbooks from notable late-career poets, including Rae Armantrout’s climate change poems and Yusef Komunyakaa’s love poems.
The book’s title poem alludes to Lee’s mother and grandmother wistfully singing songs about the old China from which they were exiled following the Communist revolution. A rocky childhood in Indonesia and other countries hostile to ethnic Chinese on his way to the U.S. colors both Lee’s poems and his close maternal feelings. Not many people, after all, can credibly say that their mother carried them “across two seas and four borders, / fleeing death by principalities and powers,” as he writes in “The Blessed Knot.”
This collection is well-timed following Lee’s 2024 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement and last year’s well-received The Invention of the Darling (W. W. Norton). Whether readers are new to these poems or already familiar with Lee’s work, they can get a great feel for a classic poet at a reasonable price. As both a reader and the editor of a chapbook-focused magazine, I hope Wesleyan University Press keeps these gems coming.
I Ask My Mother to Sing: Mother Poems of Li-Young Lee ed. Oliver Egger. Wesleyan University Press, August 2025.
Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator and editor of the Philly Chapbook Review, and his critical work has appeared in Fugue, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.
