Cover features an illustration of a bear.

Dear bear,

Ae Hee Lee

$18.00 $15.20 (includes shipping)

978-1-913007-10-2 · 48 pages · 153 × 234 mm · Apr. 2021

Dear bear, is a collection of letters, a compendium of notes to both the apocalyptic and the paradoxical self. Its setting, the forest, is both physical and metaphorical, and the titular bear real and unreal. The world here is an abstraction—both an inevitable destruction and a romantic conservation.

Ae Hee Lee was born in South Korea, raised in Peru, and now resides in the United States. She obtained an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is currently a PhD candidate in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Praise & Reviews

Ae Hee Lee’s evocative epistles in Dear bear are love poems as much for the post-glacial earth she resurrects in the aftermath of a great flood as for the title character with whom the speaker longs to make a home in the forest ‘at the border of every ruin, of every past home.’ — Brenda Cárdenas

Lee rethinks the myths, and she starts this by shedding her own skin, thinking of herself a sea snake. Throughout the book, Lee shapes metaphors and tears them down; one of her gifts to poetry is how she opens the possibility of building on what cannot be whole. — Valerie Mejer Caso

Lee’s Dear bear, is a tantalizing never-ending sequence that makes love on the page, all the while contemporizing the epistolary tradition of literature and emphasizing the importance of ecology. I want to capture all the bursting berries and pear blossoms of this universe. — Dorothy Chan

Rare is the book of poems that hooks you from the dedication page, but ‘For Daniel, to the end.’ captures the irresistibly fatal dart that is Ae Hee Lee’s Dear bear. — Joyelle McSweeney

This chapbook is so beastly resilient, so voluptuous in its elegance, and so passionately written that it could make ‘your biggest secret: your fetish for small feet’ stop hibernating or heighten your sense of smell for Lee’s work. — Vi Khi Nao

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