‘To dwell / in the meanwhile’

A Review of Ae Hee Lee’s Connotary

In the swell of Ae Hee Lee’s deft lyrical voice, Connotary, the winner of the 2021 Frost Chapbook Contest, travels between Korea, Peru, and the U.S., exploring how shared language, ritual, and notions of home can reveal the difficulties of human connection by exposing the small, untranslatable gaps between us and those we love. In “Trujillo :: Homecoming,” Alejandra welcomes the speaker back to “[their] first home” with wide arms, but even in the midst of this warm encounter, the speaker says her heart “stutters.” She doesn’t remember if she should turn her head left or right to receive Alejandra’s kiss and then comments: 

[…] I whisper it’s okay, 
es normal—for there to be sorrow 
in forgetting how to cross 
through gaps, now filled 
with gossamer veils of time. 
Gwaenchanh-a, está bien—
for people to become strangers
to their own bodies, question
why absences insist
on weaving something new.

Connotary by Ae Hee Lee. Bull City Press, 2021. 31 pages. $12.

Weaving together English, Spanish, and Korean, Lee reveals the complexities embedded within the speaker’s homecoming. In English (the language of the three with which I am most familiar), the phrase “it’s okay” can connote an array of sentiments, from “all is well” to “this is tolerable,” to “this is not acceptable at all.” In my limited understanding of Spanish and even more limited understanding of Korean, I know that Gwaenchanh-a, está bien mean “it’s okay” but at the same time, I am aware of the other connotations that waft behind these words, inaccessible to me as a non-fluent speaker of either language. The reiteration of this phrase “it’s okay” in three different languages seems to take on an incantatory inflection; implicit in the speaker’s utterance of this phrase, she seems to both acknowledge and attempt to reach across her distance from Alejandra. At the end of the poem, the speaker “unfurl[s] deeper into green” under Alejandra’s “embrace of lush / unfamiliar arms.” (12) It is not through language alone that one reaches across distance, Lee seems to suggest, but through embodied movement—which, perhaps all language is, to some extent. 

In The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist, Angel F. Méndez-Montoya writes that “there is a relationship between sabor and saber (savoring and knowing). Perhaps the library and kitchen are in fact united by one and the same splendid desire: the desire to both savor and to know.” (28) Perhaps, then, it is no coincidence that many of the poems in Connotary that most strikingly explore how the complexities of shared language and ritual are those that deal with food. The desire that drives the impulse to both savor and know draws us toward each other, even while making us more acutely aware of the ways in which knowledge is often never fully communicable from one person to another.  

In “Kimchi :: In Trujillo,” the speaker’s mother invites the speaker to taste Peruvian salt, which is “unfamiliar,” “a thinner crystal” and “slightly sour” – different, one presumes, from the salt her mother used in Korea to make kimchi. The speaker is aware of her mother’s perception of this difference, but the speaker notes that she has “nothing to compare it with yet.” (5) She later explains that her mother extends her supply of Korean pepper flakes by mixing them with ají panca, Peruvian red pepper. Her mother teaches the speaker that jeong is “love / that comes with time, similar to the process of fermentation, / similar to the slow dyeing of brined leaves.” (6) In “Milagro :: Edges,” the speaker and Alejandra eat pineapple slices together. Lee reveals how eating together evokes communal connection: the two are “a brief intersection / of elbows, a small choir of helpless slurps.” At the same time, the poem suggests that eating, on some level, is also a fundamentally solitary experience. Generally, the sensations of tasting, feeling, and digesting food are, in some ways, ours alone. While Alejandra eats until her hands are empty, the speaker eats until she reaches the center of her slice, “the corazón, coeur, / a core” which is inedible to her: “hard and not so sweet.” The speaker comments that, 

Once I read each heart knows 
its own bitterness,

and no one else 
can share its joy.

By exploring the complexities of intimacy, Connotary suggests that perhaps it is the shared desire for connection that actually draws us together. The more languages and shared rituals we accumulate, the more empowered we are to express that desire, even if it is a desire that may, at times, remains unsatisfied. 

Lee takes the book’s epigraph from Alberto Ríos’s poem, “Some Extensions on the Sovereignty of Science” and the poems in Connotary might be seen to be in conversation with this poem, which concludes: 

The smallest muscle in the human body is in the ear.
It is also the only muscle that does not have blood vessels;

It has fluid instead. The reason for this is clear:
The ear is so sensitive that the body, if it heard its own pulse,

Would be devastated by the amplification of its own sound.
In this knowledge I sense a great metaphor,

But I do not want to be hasty in trying to capture or describe it.
Words are our weakest hold on the world.

On some level, Ríos’s poem, as well as the poems in Connotary suggest that language is our weakest hold on the world because often,  an implication or connotation will evade our communication with each other—something will always remain untranslatable. However, these poems also imply that words are our weakest hold on the world because there are forces that hold us to the world even more strongly—love, longing, even our shared awareness of being alone (together)—that keep us in the world, attempting to bridge the distances that constantly move and unfurl between us.