SOURCE: Kitchen, Judith. “Auditory Imagination: The Sense of Sound.” Georgia Review 45, no. 1 (spring 1991): 154-69.

In the following excerpt, Kitchen assesses the aural achievement of The City in Which I Love You, highlighting its themes, rhythms, and language.

Li-Young Lee's second book, The City in Which I Love You, is the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. This is a work of remarkable scope—musically as well as thematically—offering a sweeping perspective of history from the viewpoint of the émigré. He speaks for the disenfranchised, but from the particular voice of a late-twentieth-century Chinese-American trying to make sense of both his heritage and his inheritance. Positioning himself as father and son, Chinese and American, exile and citizen, Lee finds himself on the cusp of history; his duty, as he sees it, is to “tell my human / tale, tell it against / the current of that vaster...