Karen An-hwei Lee
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Issue 20 | Summer 2019

Issue 20 features work by Luisa Valenzuela (translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz), Alvin Lu, J. Weintraub, Jessica Love, Keith Carver, Karen An-hwei Lee, Christopher Clubb, Mike Dressel, Jorge Enrique Botero (translated by David Feller Pegg), Talal Alyan, Carl-Christian Elze (translated by Caroline Wilcox Reul), Bijan Najdi (translated by Parisa Saranj), and Amy Forstadt. Cover art by Jerry Seguin.

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Review: Sonata in K by Karen An-hwei Lee

By Alvin Lu

“Not a poet-novelist,” a fictional Franz Kafka calls himself in Sonata in K. This hard-to-classify work about the misadventures of Kafka and a 38-year-old polyglot Japanese American interpreter named K in Los Angeles, Amerika’s weirdest city, is also poet Karen An-hwei Lee’s first novel.

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New poetry/videos by Karen An-hwei Lee

Karen An-hwei Lee (“Letter from Orange Country,” Issue 4) has a new chapbook, What the Sea Earns for a Living forthcoming from Quaci Press in December 2014. She has also produced a new poetry-video, which makes its debut here.   FIRE ON ANGEL ISLAND  for the...

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On Light Noise as Translation

By Karen An-hwei Lee

Several years ago, a friend gave me a gift subscription to a magazine that sent, in turn, a sequence of maps—a bird migration map, a global warming map, a seas-of-the-world map, a night-sky atlas, and a map of the globe at night.

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Review: The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson

By Karen An-hwei Lee

Who is Albertine? For a clandestine majority averse to reading all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time, a young woman named Albertine may be lost, indeed. On the Carsonian continuum, however, The Albertine Workout considers this question in a lively style: who is she? Carson’s survey of Proust’s novel takes the shape of a marvelous serial poem—with nary a dull mention of the narrator’s ruminations over a cup of tea and madeleines—illuminating the finer details of Albertine’s character.

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Issue 4 | Summer 2014

With the summer heat just around the corner, Your Impossible Voice #4 is here to refresh and delight! Our latest issue brings new work from Fulbright Foundation fellow R. Zamora Linmark, National Endowment for the Arts fellow Geraldine Connolly, Norma Farber First Book Award winner Karen An-hwei Lee, Donald Hall Prize winner Kirsten Kaschock, David Bajo, Chris Yamashita, Racquel Goodison, Michael du Plessis, Sven Hansen-Löve, John Beckman, Christopher Kondrich, Sammy Greenspan, Peter Burzynski, Bryce Emley, Monica Macansantos, Sierra-Nicole Qualles. Cover art by Jason Trbovich.

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An Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita

By Karen An-hwei Lee

An avid fan of Karen Tei Yamashita’s fiction—Brazil-Maru, Through the Arc of the Rainforest, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, and I Hotel—I was thrilled to pick up Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance, the long-awaited anthology of electrifying performance worksedited by Stephen Hong Sohn in collaboration with Yamashita herself. Readers of Yamashita’s award-winning novels will be delighted to see her irreverent cultural motifs come alive through playscripts and archival photographs of the past three decades.

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Contributor News: Karen An-hwei Lee

Karen An-hwei Lee (review of Notes on the Mosquito) has a new book of criticism, Anglophone Literatures in theAsian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations. More, including a review, at its publisher, Cambria Press. She will also be moderating...

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Bind yourself to us with your impossible voice, your voice! sole soother of this vile despair.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Phrases

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