Underground Nation

Author: Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Publisher: Factory School (2010)

In her second book-length collection, Sueyeun Juliette Lee suggests that suicide, K-pop, tourism, and atomic explosions have emerged as expressions of the forces upholding untenable national imaginations. Go underground with her and enter into a subterranean consideration of how history collides with human memory to generate new, unseen currents for being.

"Place—both as a geographical and emotional landscape—is a primary conceit in Sueyeun Juliette Lee's brilliant second book, Underground National. One of the more intriguing factors about Lee's poetry is the way she conflates images and language to thrust the reader into a space of indeterminacies. We are confronted with the mathematics of bodies being (mis)governed, as well as the inability to attach concrete definitions to both people and situations. As Lee's words struggle, search, prod, and probe, we are forced to decipher what it means to be human and all the codifications that come with existing in a world filled with violence, greed, and damaging political ideologies."

–Steven Karl