Septuagenarian: love is what happens when I die
About this ebook
Praise for Sherry Quan Lee's Septuagenarian
In Septuagenarian, Sherry Quan Lee accepts her own invitation to look at life in retrospect, but with a new lens. Pulling from and expanding upon her previous body of work, she examines the version of herself that was writing at that time. The dignity and fire of her seventy-three-year-old gaze taking in snapshots of those selves...straightens my spine and gives me a vision for myself traveling today into my future septuagenarian. --Lola Osunkoya, MA, LPCC
Sherry Quan Lee writes courageously to understand herself and the world. She uses rich language and her skills as a storyteller to focus her sharp lens on what it means to have a complex, sometimes complicated identity: becoming invisible as she ages, a history of passing unseen, love and sex, grieving and celebration. She ruminates on history, which repeats itself in the current moment and widens her lens to look at the bigger, global picture to tell truths in poems that tenderly hold memory, time, rituals, trauma, mothering, fear of death and love in many forms. Her poems offer deeply personal, intimate and perceptive insights and opportunities to reflect on what it means to truly live. It feels like I've taken the journey with her, and I'm wiser for it. --Shay Youngblood, author of Soul Kiss and Black Girl in Paris
Septuagenarian by Sherry Quan Lee, is a book that answers, in many different ways, the question posed in one of the poems contained within: "What does surrender look like?" Surrender looks like passion, like the banishment of shame, like truth telling. The narrator is not afraid of death, but embraces the inseparability and magnitude of opposing forces: "The world is a large body of terror where good and evil coexist, and each of us is responsible." Quan Lee's bold language makes space for living within impossibilities. It is a book that maps, often with aching beauty, many of the author's passions, desires, grief and the circularity of life at seventy, "I have lost so many people over time, but at seventy long-term memory brings them back, both the wicked and the wise...story ends where it begins." -- 신 선 영 辛善英 Sun Yung Shin, author of Unbearable Splendor
Learn more at blog.SherryQuanLee.com
From Modern History Press
About the author
Sherry Quan Lee, MFA, University of Minnesota, is the author of Chinese Blackbird, a memoir in verse; How to Write a Suicide Note, serial essays that saved a woman’s life; Love Imagined: a mixed-race memoir (a Minnesota Book Award Finalist); and, the picture book And You Can Love Me a story for everyone who loves someone with ASD—all published by LHP, Modern History Press, Ann Arbor, MI. She is the editor of How Dare We! Write: a multicultural creative writing discourse, an anthology finding home in university writing classrooms.
