Review of "invisible sister" by Jeffrey Ethan Lee

Many Mountains Moving Press, Boulder, CO. 2004
70 pp. $11.95, ISBN 1-886976-15-5
Visit the "invisible sister" Web page to find online poems, author contact information, upcoming readings, free audio files of the poetry, an author interview, ordering information, etc., at http://www.unco.edu/poetry/jeffrey.lee/invisible%20sister%20web%20page/index.htm or at http://www.mmminc.org (follow the Many Mountains Moving Press link).
 

“…I rose like a helium balloon/and flew north toward the spring/of all insane sexuality,” writes Jeffrey Ethan Lee in his debut collection, "invisible sister."  The book begins as a poetry of childhood — of curiosity, embarrassment, cruelty, and rage, of innocence explored, revealed, and plucked.  Between these pages, the notion of the self, as a single, defined entity is unheard of.  He writes, “I could’ve been anyone/if only the cells of the self/would’ve let me out.” 

A fascinating page-turner, this imaginative collection reaches deep into hidden hollows and takes hold of the questions residing there. Hunger, sexuality, and injury fracture with such potent honesty that the act of distancing and crafting a voyeur-self into music feels, as its witness, both deviant and out of body. Remarkably far from a poetry of stock discovery where the writer overpowers the voice of his work, rather here, the speakers do the speaking — a limitless language of yearning, trauma, and intrigue.

In “invisible sister,” the long title poem which makes up the bulk of the collection, the tongues of two separate voices — one male and one female — call out in an unscripted dialogic form that, like the earlier section, leaves readers to decipher between the imagined, the desired, and the feared. “What if this world is what we are afraid it is?”

These poems have the utmost respect for their audience, thereby leaving room for reader interpretation and interaction. Not a chance of dozing off,  nothing here is or will ever be spoon fed. Like human personality at its individual ideal, each poem is true to itself and its “art,” never led around on the choke chain of story-agenda or the traditional expectations
of established forms of verse. What happens when spontaneous voices and events find home and harmony in the rhythms of a dialogic structure? Not unlike with the music of John Cage (one of Lee’s influences), we find wholeness in organic layers of distinct displacement.

It is no surprise to learn that Lee’s writing is profoundly affected by music, and specifically Johann Sebastian Bach. Of his own melodic two-voiced lyric form, Lee writes, “…like the left and right hands on the piano — their harmony can be completely appreciated only if you hear each voice independently before you play them against each other.” As if the voices cannot, despite their trying, hear one another, the raw mesmerizing lyric continues to haunt and taunt, thereby keeping readers in a state of satisfying hunger. This is not a world set in stone and brick but a living, breathing identity in flux. Unbound by form and body, it is bravely and openly human.

 

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