The Bees Make Money in the Lion

Author: Lo Kwa Mei-en

Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center (2016)

"The Bees Make Money in the Lion is a journey across a dizzying landscape of immigrants and androids, of alien romance and elegies. Here we encounter a language that is both familiar and estranging: phones burble, voices tune by 'auto-fable,' and we are kicked 'in the essay.' Lo Kwa Mei-en is a formalist trickster: her aubades, sonnets, and pastorals are like none you've ever read before, stuttering with rapid- fire rhymes and repetitions, pulling you through unexpected swerves. Reading this remarkable collection is like 'downloading a copy of a consciousness FAQ,' finding within it a fractured yet powerful voice. 'Voltas fail' and forms falter, but Lo Kwa Mei-en's poems declare: 'here we are, unhurt nowhere, / editing violence until we dawn.'"

–Timothy Yu

"If rapture is a dizzy ecstasy brought on by a love no deeper than a hot mouth, then call me taken in and taken over. Lo Kwa Mei-en's The Bees Make Money in the Lion is bawdiness and bombast, a babel of tongues locked and loaded, vowel-drunk and pledging allegiance to the bones of a lion. These downloaded colonists and conquerors masquerading as citizens romance the future, drag you to the edge by your treacherous light. I want to lick these poems from z to a, wear this sonnet crown like a riddled king of this alien kingdom and its honeyed kingdom come."

–Traci Brimhall

Winner of the 2015 CSU Poetry Center Open Book Competition, selected by Lesle Lewis, Shane McCrae, and Wendy Xu