Winner of the 2010 Perugia Press Prize for a first or second book of poetry by a womanHow is lineage influenced by immigration, culture, and language? In what ways do expectations, ideas, and acts of inheritance haunt us? In Each Crumbling House, Melody Gee writes about the fractious, disappointing, and also enriching experience of being first-generation Asian American. Gee asks about inheriting a language that isn’t hers and a culture that died during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, while she tangles with the loss of her mother’s culture, food, history, and home. Written with precision of line, image, and syntax, these restrained lyric poems invite and reward the reader with their grace, and stand out for their historical and emotional interweaving.
Melody S. Gee grew up in Cerritos, California, and attended the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of New Mexico. In 2008 she received the Robert Watson Poetry Prize, a Pushcart nomination, and was a Kundiman Poetry Retreat fellow. She teaches writing at Southwestern Illinois College and lives with her husband, Paul, in St. Louis, Missouri.
More information here.
