The Undressing

This fifth book from William Carlos Williams Award winner Lee (Book of My Nights) elucidates his family's history and the sometimes violent circumstances surrounding their escape from China to Indonesia as political refugees finally settling in the United States in 1964. Lee's background as a Presbyterian minister lends great spiritual deftness and an ecclesiastical quietude that proves refreshing. Between deeply moving accounts of his relationship to his family, especially his mother and their shared unspoken trauma, Lee outlines the seductions of love and death, how both hold us in similar thrall. While one might be forgiven for seeing the multipage title poem, an account of a man undressing a woman who seems uninterested in his sexual advances, as a bit tone deaf given the current conversation surrounding sexual assault, in all, the poems that follow deepen the metaphor beyond a shallow sexual angle with spiritual, familial, and cultural dimensions.