September 21, 2005
Real Karaoke People and Ed Bok Lee
Hey everyone! Here is a great new book of prose and poetry by one of my closest friends in Minnesota - Ed Bok Lee. Ed's an amazing multi-genre writer (and power karaoke singer) known to many as the Korean Dream. Check out his new book and stay tuned for his book release party on October 15th at the Loft Literary Center (more info to come). Rumor has it that I will be doing some Korean cooking for it. Plus, there will be karaoke for those ready to publicly unveil their singing pipes.
REAL KARAOKE PEOPLE: POEMS AND PROSE
by Ed Bok Lee
Many Voices Award-winning New Book
Published by NEW RIVERS PRESS, release date: October 1, 2005
ED BOK LEE’s various writing awards include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Loft Literary Center, the Minnesota State Arts Board, SASE and the Jerome Foundation. He attended kindergarten in South Korea, and grew up in North Dakota and Minnesota. Lee is a former state Grand Slam Poetry champion and holds an MFA from Brown University. REAL KARAOKE PEOPLE: POEMS AND PROSE is his first book. More information at www.edboklee.com.
REAL KARAOKE PEOPLE: POEMS AND PROSE
by Ed Bok Lee
ISBN: 0-89823-226-0 CUSA / 9780898232257
Paperback, 96 pp.
$13.95
(to purchase, call your local bookstore, or visit
www.amazon.com or www.barnesandnoble.com)
ABOUT THE BOOK
A dramatic literary debut, Real Karaoke People
juxtaposes tradition, politics and pop culture to
bridge generations and continents in a way both
heart-rending and real. From a Buddhist temple on a
Korean mountain top, to Sex World in downtown
Minneapolis, to the smoldering L.A. Riots, far beyond
to a tornado touching down on a reservation in
Northern Minnesota, Ed Bok Lee’s award-winning poems
and stories usher the reader through a cultural
kaleidoscope of karaoke rooms, churches, dog fights,
movie houses, Asian night clubs, immigrant kitchens
and small-time Midwestern wrestling rings, all the
while scrutinizing conceptions of race, class and
history. At once nostalgic, critical and revelatory,
Real Karaoke People offers a provocative portrayal of
an America at war with change and loss, hope and the
living colors of desire.
Real Karaoke People will appeal to a wide variety of
domestic and international readers (of all ethnic
backgrounds and ages) with personal connections to the
changing face of America, the Immigrant Experience,
Karaoke singing, Poetry Slams, Hip-Hop, Buddhism, the
Korean War, and/or Travel through Asia.
ADVANCE PRAISE
"Real Karaoke People takes the rich immigrant
experience of our urban centers and gives it both a
quiet grace and the energy of
hip-hop....reinvigorating the Whitmanian tradition for
the twenty first century—one of the most impressive
debuts in recent memory."
—David Mura, author of Turning Japanese
"Ed Bok Lee’s Real Karaoke People is one of the most
engaging, troubling, and rewarding collections [of
poems and prose] I have read in quite some time. There
is no place this poet’s eye does not enter, no
darkness it doesn’t look into, no light it doesn’t
absorb..."
—Pablo Medina, author of Points of Balance/Puntos de
apoyo;
President of AWP (Association of Writers & Writing
Programs)
"A master of word, music, image, and character
creation, Lee invokes Greek drama, slam poetry,
Japanese haiku, Native American storytelling,
Shakespearean sonnets, MTV, and African griots in his
beautiful ‘poelogues.’"
—Elaine H. Kim, University of California at Berkeley
"Ed Bok Lee will break your heart and sew it back up
again with his piercing words... Real Karaoke People
will make you want to break into song."
—Ishle Yi Park, author of The Temperature of This
Water/Poet Laureate of Queens, New York
"The narrator is unforgettable— as well as his
characters such as the man who looks for a wife 'with
oceanic lungs who can blow life into the spirit he’s
lost.'...There is voltage in these hard lessons— these
secrets on how to survive... A fire burns here."
—Diane Glancy
"Ed Bok Lee follows the exuberant tradition of poets
like Whitman and Ginsberg, those who sing wildly for
tribe and culture and self."
—Debra Marquart, author of The Hunger Bone: Rock &
Roll Stores
"What a beautifully complex, contradictory, and
insistently compelling world Ed Bok Lee gives us...
this is a book that opens up new possibilities for
American poetry."
—Jim Moore, author of Lightning at Dinner
MORE PRAISE
"Ed Bok Lee’s Real Karaoke People is one of the most
engaging, troubling, and rewarding collections [of
poems and prose] I have read in quite some time. There
is no place this poet’s eye does not enter, no
darkness it doesn’t look into, no light it doesn’t
absorb. I follow the people in his poems down
Midwestern streets, I watch them wrestle, love, dance,
fall down drunk, get up. Real karaoke people sing "in
Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, English, Korean,
Indonesian, Vietnamese." Ultimately they sing the
language of poetry, the language of us all."
—Pablo Medina, author of Points of Balance/Puntos de
apoyo;President of AWP (Association of Writers &
Writing Programs)
"What a beautifully complex, contradictory, and
insistently compelling world Ed Bok Lee gives us in
Real Karaoke People. This is a book that takes as its
jumping off place the idea that the "global soul" is
not a literary invention, but a vision and a
sustaining home: as real as a hot summer's day in
South Minneapolis or a cold winter's day in Seoul in
1945. These poems move surely through many different
realities, thanks to compelling narratives and a lyric
grace which both inspires and challenges: this is a
book that opens up new possibilities for American
poetry."
—Jim Moore, author of Lightning at Dinner
"Real Karaoke People takes the rich immigrant
experience of our urban centers and gives it both a
quiet grace and the energy of hip-hop. "What feeds
your soul?" the poet asks, and answers with the
pungent smells of Asian cooking, off-key voices of
karaoke, and a "girl's wicked drawl that first
crackled through a KFC late-night drive-thru speaker."
Here are delicate lyrics and verbal tours de force,
side-splitting ‘poelogues’ and plangent voices that
tear away the screens of indifference and cliché…
reinvigorating the Whitmanian tradition
for the twenty first century… one of the most
impressive debuts in recent memory."
—David Mura, author of Turning Japanese
"Stories, nightmares, fables, myths, tall tales,
legends, family secrets... Ed Bok Lee will break your
heart and sew up back up again with his piercing
words… I felt like a changed woman... Real Karaoke
People will make you want to break into song."
—Ishle Yi Park, author of The Temperature of This
Water/Poet Laureate of Queens, New York
"These poems come in rapid fire from a world at war
with change and loss, forgetfulness and memory. Ed Bok
Lee’s words hit like pellets. He delivers amazing
lines: "we learn to navigate by drowning." Lee is a
truth teller of the immigrant experience in our vast
and diverging demography. He brings the world right up
in our face. The narrator is unforgettable— as well as
his characters such as the man who looks for a wife
"with oceanic lungs who can blow life into the spirit
he’s lost." Lee brings knowledge of what it is like to
settle in the current New America, updating the
European immigrant experience of the last century—
providing a latter to the earlier America. There is
voltage in these hard lessons— these secrets on how to
survive. Lee’s words are his navigational devices. He
speaks with profound energy in this first collection
of poems— A fire burns here."
—Diane Glancy
"Ed Bok Lee is an exciting new American writer. His
layered collection, Real Karaoke People, chronicles a
tumultuous journey through time and space that's never
chronological or linear…an intensely emotional and
intellectual journey around decades and oceans to
glimpse America's continual becoming… A master of
word, music, image, and character creation, Lee
invokes Greek drama, slam poetry, Japanese haiku,
Native American storytelling, Shakespearean sonnets,
MTV, and African griots in his beautiful ‘poelogues.’"
—Elaine H. Kim, University of California at
Berkeley/author of Asian-American
Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their
Social Context
(for more book or author information, please contact:
Donna Carlson, Managing Editor, New Rivers Press /
carlsond@mnstate.edu / (218) 477-5870)
(for PHOTOS / INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITIES:
o Interview with and photo of author
o Print quality e-mail photo files of Book Cover and
Author Photo, please contact Lisa Fink / SASE: The
Write Place / (612) 822-2500, ext. 104 /
lisa@saseonline.org)