Jen Sookfong Lee
Jen Sookfong Lee, posing before a black background. She is wearing a black dress with a detailed flower print consisting of green leaves and small white, red, sky blue, and navy blue petals. Her arms are crossed in the front, and she is faced at an angle, tilting slightly toward camera’s left.
Biography
JEN SOOKFONG LEE was born and raised in Vancouver’s East Side, and she now lives with her son in North Burnaby. Her books include The Conjoined, nominated for International Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, The Better Mother, a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award, The End of East, The Shadow List, and Finding Home. Jen acquires and edits for ECW Press and co-hosts the literary podcast Can’t Lit.
Poetics Statement
“For me, poetry is an opportunity to fully engage with a singular aspect of writing in a way that isn’t possible with other genres. Most of my work has consequently been concerned with voice, with allowing a character to be exactly who she is, without artifice or masks. What a luxury.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Infestation
In the kitchen, they hang upside down on the ceiling,
wings folded, their bodies tucked like arrowheads,
antennae quivering so slightly you have to stand
on a chair and squint to see any movement at all.
In the bedroom at night, they fly around
your reading lamp and you can hear
their exoskeletons singe on the hot light bulb
as you open book after book without finishing any.
You burrow deep in your closet, looking for abandoned
cocoons in your sweater pile, open every container
in your pantry until you find larvae in the quinoa.
You swear they are pulsating, like they already
know how to breathe. It figures, you think, trying to eat
healthy results in a plague. Steel cut oats, pearled barley,
brown rice. All in their clear containers, so they can judge
you from within. You compost them, without regret.
The traps emit pheromones. You stay up
half the night, watching the moths circle the trap
that smells like sex, the trap that will lure them in
with the heady scent of moth desire.
They will fly in, land on the adhesive and never escape.
They last four, maybe five days before they stop
struggling and die, their tiny moth feet covered
in an unforgiving glue. This satisfies you.
Where they have come from, you don’t know,
but you create an origin story in your head.
The elderly Chinese couple next door, you think, it must be them.
Maybe they keep dry goods in their bedroom, drywall
the only thing separating your headboard from theirs.
You remember that time you cleaned out your mother’s house
and found a dozen bottles of soy sauce and seven packages
of dried cloud ear fungus hidden behind the coats in the closet.
What if there is a shelf of mung beans and jasmine rice
right behind your pillows? There the moths
build cocoons, hatch and then fly off
into your open window, straight toward your bedside lamp.
The moths know.
This is why they have come to you,
toward the only light in a dark building,
toward the promise of sex and a long, sticky death.
They know you read at night.
They know you are alone.
They know you itch with loneliness until you could scream
so you read and fail until you fall asleep.
Yesterday, You Had the Best of Intentions
A glass of water, tepid and undrunk, in the bedroom air.
A body beside you whose movements are so small
and so slow you cannot measure them.
Muddy, thick hours spent listening to the night pass.
This is the long rolling of time, that liquid dim
that breaks over the neighbours’ rooftops and leaks
through a crack in those curtains you have never hemmed.
The broken lamp beside the garage buzzing, a raccoon
walking upside down, claws tapping and tapping
on the gutter it clings to. You squint, the continued
watch in the night. The black hurts your eyes.
Do you know what you’re watching for?
There are secrets, indecent and jagged like a stranger’s teeth
biting the thin line of your clavicle. You could whisper
them now and he would not hear you. But no.
You should wait. Nighttime lulls. That soft, enabling dark.
Outside, the first chickadee sings.
You have twenty minutes, maybe thirty,
before the sky lifts, burning, and kills
what you have been staring at all night long.
