A Beautiful Immunity: On Language, Healing, and the Mysticism of Survival in Karen An-Hwei Lee’s Latest Collection
What does it mean to be immune—not just in the biological sense, but in the spiritual, emotional, and linguistic realms? In The Beautiful Immunity, Karen An-Hwei Lee crafts a poetic lexicon of survival, one that moves fluidly between the scientific and the surreal, between prayer and a deep, almost alchemical reverence for language. This collection pulses with lyricism, its precision sharpened by a careful unraveling of sound, breath, and absence. Yet, even in its most meditative silences, Lee’s work resists retreat. Instead, these poems seek an expansive form of protection—through words, through faith, through the body’s ability to adapt.
From the title alone, The Beautiful Immunity suggests a duality: a shield that is also an aesthetic, a survival that does not merely endure but transforms. Immunity, in Lee’s hands, is more than a bodily defense—it is a poetics of resilience, a response to both environmental and spiritual precarity.
In “Dear Millennium, on the Beautiful Immunity”, Lee’s speaker addresses the 21st century with a mixture of irony and supplication, asking for reprieve from a world marked by contamination, both biological and ideological. The poem opens with a tone that is both wistful and defiant:
“Dear millennium, you never promised to give me
a full strawberry moon, or amnesty from bioexile,
or genetically modified honey and roasted stone fruit.
Will the moon fall out of the sky?”
Here, there is a subtle critique of modernity’s broken promises. The millennium, personified, is both an era and an indifferent force, a time of technological and medical advancement but also of exile and estrangement. The phrase “bioexile” suggests a sense of displacement at the level of the body, a world where genetic modification has seeped into even the most fundamental aspects of sustenance—honey, fruit, immunity itself.
As the poem progresses, Lee tightens the critique, pivoting to environmental degradation and xenophobia:
“Please don’t feel obliged to love me back. Instead, grant me a beautiful immunity
to viral strains with evolved vaccine resistance—
zika of fetal microencephaly, chronic fatigue syndrome,
plagues of dyspepsia and dysthymia in the nervous weather of vulnerability—”
The juxtaposition of scientific terminology with poetic phrasing, “the nervous weather of vulnerability”, underscores Lee’s ability to fuse the clinical and the lyrical. This is a world where illness and emotional fragility blur into each other, where even the body’s natural defenses are compromised by forces beyond its control. The closing lines drive home the final act of defiance:
Don’t worry about loving me until death do us part—
I’m immune to your pathologies, my dear.”
By reframing immunity as both a biological and emotional resistance, Lee challenges the reader to consider what forms of protection are truly possible in an era of pandemics, environmental collapse, and cultural alienation.
One of the most striking elements of The Beautiful Immunity is Lee’s ability to oscillate between precise, almost clinical language and moments of dreamlike surrealism. Nowhere is this contrast more apparent than in “Seven Cantos on Silence as Via Negativa”, where Lee unspools silence into a series of shifting metaphors:
“Neither is the word silence equivalent to the loveliest of lovely days
beginning with love and lengthening with the light
where an open parenthesis never closes—”
Silence, rather than being an absence, is given form here—it stretches and lengthens, its presence signified by an “open parenthesis” that never resolves. The interplay between syntax and meaning is crucial; the hanging dash at the end of the line visually enacts the unresolved nature of silence, its ongoing, unbroken presence.
Later, in Canto 2, Lee extends the metaphor into something more fragile, almost architectural:
“Neither is it an invisible flock of small n-dashes
flying in hyphens of horizontal light to a skyline
where little nothings brush the air with em-dashes
as pauses or broken spaces—”
Here, punctuation itself becomes a stand-in for sound and breath. The precise choice of “n-dashes” and “em-dashes” transforms typographic elements into something kinetic, birdlike. This is silence in motion, a landscape of absence constructed through the delicate balance of pause and space.
Yet, even as Lee leans into meticulous control, she is unafraid to let her language unravel into something more hallucinatory. In “On Levitation at the Carp-Tail Sugar Factory”, she crafts an image of defiance against gravity, where small objects and bodies alike resist the expected laws of physics:
“As if the levitation of miniature objects is a surprise—
scale isn’t a miracle of perception
or fruit of anti-gravity.
A robin’s egg on the palm of my hand, aloft in June—
bird-soul’s turquoise belt.”
The phrase “scale isn’t a miracle of perception” suggests a rejection of illusion—levitation, in this context, is not merely a trick of the eyes but something inherent to the objects themselves. This speaks to a broader thematic concern in Lee’s work: the idea that survival, resilience, and even beauty are not illusions, but deeply rooted in the fabric of existence.
Throughout The Beautiful Immunity, spirituality is not just a theme but a mode of inquiry. Lee’s work is deeply engaged with mysticism, not as dogma but as a poetic method for understanding the world. In “Irenology”, she explicitly ties poetry to the act of peace-making, invoking biblical imagery alongside notions of exile and restoration:
“Open in Ezra and paging to Nehemiah,
I contemplate exiles rebuilding temple walls.
I thought, is this a form of peace studies?”
Here, the act of rebuilding—both literal and metaphorical—becomes a spiritual practice. The poem moves between religious devotion and historical reckoning, asking how peace circulates and whether it can be reconstructed, much like the temple walls.
This preoccupation with spiritual paradox reaches its most haunting expression in “Zona Negativa”, a poem that loops on itself, echoing phrases like a chant or incantation:
“solo
alight and over—
humming our souls
arisen, a redolence of God,
fragrance, a myrrh residue,
offering splendid zones of salvage—”
The repetition of “solo” at both the beginning and end creates a circular, meditative effect, reinforcing the solitude of the speaker’s spiritual searching. The phrase “splendid zones of salvage” is particularly arresting—it suggests that even within destruction, there are places where something sacred can be recovered.
Karen An-Hwei Lee’s The Beautiful Immunity is a book of paradoxes: silence that is full, immunity that is fragile, survival that is both scientific and mystical. Through lyrical precision and surreal flourish, she crafts a poetic space where language itself becomes a form of resilience—a way to navigate illness, uncertainty, and a world in flux. In the end, these poems do not promise invulnerability. Rather, they suggest that true immunity is not about avoidance, but about adaptation, about finding a voice that resists even as it sings.
Emi Bergquist (she/her) is a New York based poet, performer, and content creator. An active member of The Poetry Society of New York since 2015, her has work published in over ten literary journals including The Headlight Review, What Rough Beast, Oxford Public Philosophy, Oroboro, Passengers Journal, For Women Who Roar, Noctua Review, In Parentheses, and others. When not reading or writing poetry, Emi prefers to spend most of her time at the park with her rescue dog, Zola.