Mirinae Lee's debut novel, 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster, has been published by Harper Collins. Lee's story "Me, Myself, and Mole" appeared in our Fall 2021 issue.
Tupelo Press just released ...
Al had not been blessed with charm. Or pleasing aspect. Or verve. Or intellect, that I could discern, though she must have had some scrap of it to have gained acceptance in the first instance. She was a lumpen thing, all fuzzy hair, pigeon toes, and befuddled grin, her broad back humping round under that filthy yellow backpack, flouting our lofty ideals with her very existence. This was unforgivable to me.
—from "Invasive Species," Vol. 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In second grade, I wrote a story about my teacher called “Why Are You So Crazy?” I gave it to my teacher as a gift. In my memory, she thought I was a genius and acknowledged that she was indeed crazy, but my mother...
After I persuade
my students there is
a name for everything,
for days I mull on what
to call the kind of kind
dissembling I've done.
—from "Dustsceawung," Vol. 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Once I read an interview where Shane McCrae talked about reading some of his earliest published poems. Years had passed, and McCrae’s style and voice had changed, and he noted that, of course. But what I loved was how he regarded those early pieces without embarrassment. It felt like, in fact, he looked on them as sweet, bemusing reminders of the way he used to write. I would like to have that relationship with my oldest poems.
Instead, I am a little...
Right when the dissector picks up the eye, I notice the sun
has already found a place to bruise with light.
With slight pressure, she shifts the pink flesh and muscle.
That eye can't see to ask its paths. Or fact its ransom.
—from "Blind Spot," Volume 64, Issue 1 (Spring 2023)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The one that comes to mind is my poem, “Slow.” It’s four quatrains and perhaps the only one of my poems I have fully memorized. The poem circles around the beauty of New Mexico, but also the dangers. A bark beetle blight had devastated a massive number of piñon trees here in the high desert. The trees were vulnerable to the infestation because of drought. Ironically, I...
In the same spot where Father died, the dead body of a deer lay prostrate in the rain. Raindrops collected on the ground, flowing like a river. Invisible to the naked eye, electricity trickled into the moist soil as if through the veins of leaves, electrons packed closely together. Micro-organisms gnawed away quietly, exchanging trace elements, absorbing the weaker monomers to form new substances, or nutrients for the plants and soil.
—from "Raining Zebra Finches" by Chiou Charng-Ting, Translated by May Huang, Volume 64, Issue 1 (Spring 2023)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
I translated Ya Hsien’s poem “Chicago” as an undergrad studying abroad in Chicago, reading and learning about the...
