BOOKS

"When Pattiann Rogers selected PYX for the 2004 National Poetry series, she praised the way Corinne Lee 'skillfully interweaves wit, playfulness, and a joie de vivre with serious study and meditations.' PYX takes its title from the box containing the host, a wafer that is transformed into spirit upon consumption. And Lee’s poems effect similar transformations. Death, adultery, and a fractured marriage become occasions for redemption. Scenes from domestic life are juxtaposed with themes from art, philosophy, and literature. PYX moves effortlessly between high and low culture, between the mundane, sacred, and profane, exploring the possibilities of language with exhilarating vigor." 

 — Penguin Books

"Using Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a springboard, Corinne Lee’s second book is an eco-epic that investigates and embodies the deterioration of America’s environment due to industrial agriculture, fossil fuels, war, racism, and technology. Lee’s book-length work draws upon a variety of poetic forms and histories—especially events in 1892, which included  a surge in lynching in America and the beginning of our coup d’état of Hawaii—to examine how modern technology facilitated the Holocaust, sustains America’s racist prison industrial complex, fuels climate change, and ultimately underlies what has been called the Sixth Extinction. A daring and dazzling narrative of great originality, Plenty advocates a feminist ecobuddhist perspective: only by dismantling false hierarchies, especially those of patriarchal capitalism, are we able to recognize that all agents of environmental collapse are one with us."

  — Penguin Books