Refracted Migrations: On Ae Hee Lee’s “Asterism”

EARLY ON IN Ae Hee Lee’s debut collection of poetry, Asterism (Tupelo Press, 2023), winner of the Dorset Prize, the speaker writes of the lasting impact of quotidian memory and the transfiguration that comes with migration. Recalling Alejandra, her childhood friend in Peru, as well as a boy who once cooked pasta for her as it rained lightly in the background, the speaker admits: “Both the boy and the rain remain in her body still, seeping.”

The speaker’s predicament is much like Alejandra’s—a palimpsest of all the places and languages she has inhabited. Drawing on her Peruvian upbringing in Trujillo, her adulthood in the United States, and her Korean heritage, the speaker attempts to situate herself among the three places, comparing life in each. Asterism is divided into three parts, roughly dealing with each region’s food practices, languages, and immigration processes. Cooking for friends and being questioned by a customs officer are reminders of her own sense of refraction, feeling spliced and put together again across multiple migrations and departures. The poems mimic an asterism, a pattern of stars that do not make a constellation.

In “Dream Series of My Mother Making Kimchi in Trujillo,” she remembers her mother’s “concave back” hunched over a plastic tub while making kimchi, even though the Napa cabbages and Korean flakes are rare in Peru. Her mother’s “candy red” gloves leave no white patch untouched. Dreaming in present-day Wisconsin, the speaker recalls the brine and fermentation as a metaphor for migration, its lingering sharpness and tactility.

This in-betweenness is also evoked by the speaker’s use of both Spanish and Korean, particularly when in dialogue. In “Sijo :: Genealogy,” the speaker’s father makes a pun on “dari,” the Korean word for both leg and bridge. As someone unfamiliar with both languages, I found that this enriched the text and enlivened the page.

In addition to linguistic doubling, the collection’s themes also include mirroring—the speaker’s insistence on the external world reflecting and expanding upon the self. Juxtaposing maps and bodily imagery, borders and place serve as a mirror into the speaker’s mental state. The physical world warps itself to echo the speaker’s own feelings of displacement and belonging. Take, for instance, the poem “On Borders”:

III.

I ask a map why does an oasis
stops extending its waters
where it does. And it asks
how far would I go for an eye
clasping a feral dawn, teeming
with a thousand weary evenings.

IV.

I overhear a man talk about this country
as if it were a walnut splitting under
the pressure of desire. I recognize
the crack threading the husk—a hole
forfeiting its seed to a chamber
full of teeth. I walk over and say
a country is not a walnut. He says it is
his walnut, and bites down.

In both of these fragments, the world is in dialogue with the self. In the first stanza, the map and the eye, the latter with its history of a “thousand weary evenings,” can be read as mirror images of each other. In the second, the country, its ownership, the man, and the self—the perpetual immigrant—coalesce around the walnut. The terse, short lines add to the poem’s restraint, balancing some of the lusher imagery—the “feral dawn” and the “pressure of desire.”

This sense of reflection is further heightened by the speaker’s use of the second-person pronoun, often associated with a lover. Projecting some of her anxieties onto the “you,” the speaker creates distance between herself and her predicament. Examining these anxieties outside of herself, allows for productive detachment. In “Green Card :: Evidence of Adequate Means of Financial Support,” the speaker is addressed by a lover:

        I needed money. There’s no poetic way to say this.
        Even so, when you touched my face, brought my
        cheeks to the nook of your neck, I burrowed into it—
        a firefly seeking shelter from winter, far
        underground. Then,
        you told me there’s no application form that can hold
        the entirety of a life, because our days constantly spill like wine.
                Imagine that, you said, apricot tones all over the page!

The richness of the “you” makes for a productive tension between the prosaic, matter-of-fact quality of the speaker’s admission of needing money and the lover’s body, both refuge and rebuttal. Similarly, the vivacity of the “apricot tones” amplify the “pressure of desire.” There is also a dreamy shift in temporality with the indentation at “Imagine.” The naming of the poem, with its use of a double colon after the subtitle opens up a channel between the two clauses (also seen in other poems such as “Naturalization :: Migration”).

At its strongest, the writing in Asterism is taut with the interplay of silence and vibrant imagery—the endings of the poems border on the silence of anticlimax, yet they fan out in different directions, reminiscent of Meena Alexander’s quiet, visually rich, confident style. The poem “Mercado Central :: Marginalia” swells and retreats until the speaker is both an observer and an active participant within the narrative:

                                The man shifts
        the weight of the load onto his
        left side, releases his other hand
        to cross his chest. He quickly kisses
        two fingertips
                                               alight
        and presses them barely against
        the glass: ashen prints on the dim
        reflection of my forehead.
        I could say
                                             I understand
        longing, but the truth is I know
        nothing of his. At the corner,
        I’m trading my coins for a bag
        of yucca sticks;
                                      they remind
        me of the snow and birch trees
        lingering through another country’s
        winter—
                                       A story
        at the hem of his story, all
        I can say is that he might have
        glimpsed back.

The shifts in this poem—the “ashen prints” on the glass, the “snow and birch trees / lingering through another country’s / winter”—have a suppleness and reflectiveness that is never sentimental. Her admittance at the end, “all / I can say,” also highlights her own limitations and adds to the writing’s overall candidness.

This poem, with its glimpsing back in particular, reminded me of Meena Alexander’s Birthplace with Buried Stones (Northwestern University Press, 2013). Alexander melds her own experiences—rich with geographical imagery from her travels, including the Himalayas and New York City’s Bryant Park—with Bashō’s writing to create a dense inner landscape.

Stylistically, the poems in Asterism are varied in form. The collection’s sijos, a Korean form comprised of a total of 44–46 syllables, are delicate. For instance, the poem “Sijo :: Meeting Point,” depicts the speaker’s wistfulness and longing:

        Wisconsin’s sky this evening is a glass
                  half-full of storm clouds.
        For a second, they are also mountains, lilac,
                   haloing the rooftops of Cajamarca.
        But I’m not there
                    nor now.

The sijo, comparing the sky to a “glass / half-full of storm clouds,” turns to the rooftops in Peru, with their lilac mountains, finally closing with the speaker and the image of her absence. The tone here is gentle, unassuming.

One of the collection’s strengths is the way Lee foregrounds the speaker amid the natural world. Several of the poems are presented as self-portraits, such as “Self-Portrait as Mother” and “Self-Portrait as Sister.” I wondered whether it would have been more potent to portray the speaker’s mother and sister as characters in their own right, unbound by the vagaries of the “self,” allowing for the development of a productive tension between the differences in their experiences of being immigrants. In “Self-Portrait as Mother,” reproduced in part below, the last few lines collapse the distance between the speaker and her mother:

With a shutter’s click, I freeze the narrow creeks
by my mother’s eyes. I notice her flourishing
pores, proof her face has been a kind host
to the dry Trujillan sky […]
She taught me how to be a foreigner,
garner my sunspots, some left by harsher stars,
some gentler, knit a plentiful basket out of myself.
Another day we’ll rummage through it and relive ourselves
in each other. I show my mother the photo I’ve taken:
a lone piece of winter light had landed on her left cheek, as if it too could sense in her a
glint of its future.

While the description of the “flourishing / pores” and the mother teaching the speaker how to be a foreigner is vivid, the ending, with its “reliv[ing] ourselves / in each other” and “glint of the future,” seems too neat a conclusion. Perhaps the title and conceit limited the other directions the poem might have taken.

In “Self-Study Through Prefixes,” a series of prose poems, the reader is introduced to different words embodying the foreign, the composite, and the different—all states claimed by the immigrant. One prose poem is on the prefix “multi”:

Multi-: more than one; many, especially variegated. Example: “multicolor.” Think kaleidoscope. A spinning circus of several colored-glass. From the Latin multus, “much, many.” The existence of more than one. In one. Example: “multicultural.” Think you. Think of those you love. Think myriads of others: strangers you could love.

In this vignette, I wanted more of the rich description that appears throughout the book, and more of the speaker’s marked voice in the way they embody the notion of “multi” outlined here. I was reminded of and missed the beautiful precision of the “crinkling ghosts of leaves” that the speaker hears in an office full of papers and the “city stirring to make the city” in other poems.

Yet, Asterism is a strong debut. The tonal and formal variety in the collection is deft and delicate and does not sugarcoat the anxieties and economic pressures of immigration, which also lead to a world full of complexity and vivacity.

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