SOURCE: Slowik, Mary. “Beyond Lot's Wife: The Immigration Poems of Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, and David Mura.” MELUS 25, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 2000): 221-42.

In the following essay, Slowik compares and contrasts Lee's treatment of immigrant themes to those of Asian-American poets Garrett Hongo, Marilyn Chin, and David Mura, demonstrating the ways each “broadens and complicates the first person, meditative poetry of self-examination that dominates American writing today.”

When God tells Lot to flee Soddam and Gomorrah, he cautions him not to look back. Lot's wife cannot resist the temptation and, as they rush from the great fire storm erupting behind them, she does look back and is immediately turned into a pillar of salt. The fear of looking back and yet the compulsion to look back at the country that one has left behind infuses much cross-cultural writing in the United States today. The experience of immigration...