invisible sister (2004) — Jeffrey Ethan Lee

Cover art of Invisible Sister by Jeffrey Ethan Lee

Jeffrey Ethan Lee’s poetry book, identity papers (Ghost Road Press, 2006) was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. His first full-length poetry book, invisible sister (Many Mountains Moving Press, 2004), was a finalist for the first MMMP Book Prize. Lee won the 2002 Sow’s Ear Poetry Chapbook prize ($1,000) for The Sylf (2003), and created identity papers as a full-length dramatic poem with music on CD, which was nominated for a 2002 Spoken Word Grammy. He also published the poetry chapbooks: Strangers in a Homeland (Ashland Press, 2001), Towards Euphoria (Seven Kitchens Press, 2012— co-winner of the 2011 Editor’s Prize), Color Schemes (Moonstone Press, 2016), and Subvertisements for Utopia (Ravenna Press, 2024). His novel The Autobiography of Somebody Else was published by White Pine Press in 2016. Other poems, stories and essays have appeared in North American Review, Many Mountains Moving, Xconnect, Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Crosscurrents, Green Mountain Review, Washington Square and others. Lee teaches small summer creative writing workshops through the Philadelphia Shambhala Center.

70 pp perfect bound, acid free paper 6" x 9" Finalist in the first Many Mountains Moving Press book contest

ISBN: 1-886976-15-5

70 pages

MSRP: $11.95

In Stock: 10

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Reviews

A.V. Christie, National Poetry Series Winner

Jeffrey Lee creates a new way of reading in invisible sister, but more importantly a new way for the reader to see the book as performance space: to be orated, sung, swilled; more than this invisible sister teaches the reader how to hear and experience its special and peculiar music. The joy of the invisible is the tell-tale footprint, the door moving slightly ajar—this is a special and unique book that opens new space in the page for perception and then for the further deepening of that same space. The voice makes a sound because a stringed instrument in the body vibrates. The margins of this book vibrate—the absent center is the sound.

Thaddeus Rutkowski for Small Press Review & Gathering of the Tribes

“[T]he long poem “invisible sister”...is the heart of the work, and while it is challenging in its complexity, it will reward any reader who has ever struggled for communion with another person.”

Kazim Ali, the New England/NY Poetry Prize Winner, Alice James Books

“Jeffrey Lee creates a new way of reading in invisible sister, but more importantly a new way for the reader to see the book as performance space: to be orated, sung, swilled; more than this invisible sister teaches the reader how to hear and experience its special and peculiar music. The joy of the invisible is the tell-tale footprint, the door moving slightly ajar—this is a special and unique book that opens new space in the page for perception and then for the further deepening of that same space. The voice makes a sound because a stringed instrument in the body vibrates. The margins of this book vibrate—the absent center is the sound.”

Denise Duhamel for American Book Review

"...the title poem [is] a tour de force of persona and plot as a brother watches his sister careen out of control. “invisible sister” does indeed set up a dialogue of great tension—its sprawling formal voices and the dual (and dueling) columns challenge the notion of Asians as an “invisible” minority. Iris, the invisible sister, serves not only as witness to her own experience but becomes a sort of every-girl when she is coaxed into a barn by her white friend....

Jeffrey Ethan Lee has done a great service to performance poetry. His careful line breaks, as well as his deft use of white space and text, suggest a deliberate and thoughtful architecture that belies a common complaint that so much of performance poetry does not hold up on the page.

[T]here is much to be admired in all of Jeffrey Ethan Lee’s poetic personas and voices...."

Marj Hahne for RainTaxi Review of Books

Invisible Sister, Jeffrey Ethan Lee's first full-length collection of poems, is a daring act of language that delivers with grace the self inescapably splintered by language. In the book's prologue, Lee names some of the things that betrayed him, such as "whiteness," "pretty blonde," "beautiful doll"—terms of race and gender that indelibly constructed and confined the self: "I could've been anyone / if only the cells of the self / would've let me out." This fragmented self ("all the hiding selves who seek") takes the reader through the book's core, a long poem broken into chapters from the life of Iris, the "invisible sister" of the title.

Iris, named for the eye's light regulator; for the rainbow and its goddess; for the plant of sword-shaped leaves and variously colored flowers. No wonder, then, that eyes, rainbow, sky, sun, light, shadow, and leaves are among the words and images that reverberate throughout Invisible Sister. Also echoing throughout are words of color, weather, phase, and extension: white, blue, rain, snow, ice, flame, roots, limbs, branches, lines. Fragments of lines unfold a story told in two voices (his and hers), the overlapping of which conveys this certainty: Iris' being heard is key to her visibility, to the whole self's seeing the multicolor truth.