The collection in which "The Weight of Sweetness" appears, Rose, received New York University's Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award, and reviews of the collection were favorable. In the foreword poet Gerald Stern writes, "What characterizes Lee's poetry is a certain humility, a kind of cunning, a love of plain speech, a search for wisdom and understanding—but more like a sad than desperate search—a willingness to let the sublime enter his field of concentration and take over, a devotion to language, a belief in its holiness, a pursuit of certain Chinese ideas."

About Lee's father, the subject of "The Weight of Sweetness" and many of Lee's poems, Stern says "This is not a quaint and literary father-figure he is writing and thinking about. It is a real father, an extraordinary and heroic figure.... What makes him work as a mythical figure in Lee's...