Book Review: The Beautiful Immunity by Karen An-Hwei Lee

A Beautiful Immunity: On Language, Healing, and the Mysticism of Survival in Karen An-Hwei Lee’s Latest Collection

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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.

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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.

Clickbait Review: Kathleen McClung’s A Juror Must Fold in on Herself

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Kathleen McClung’s chapbook A Juror Must Fold in on Herself couldn’t have arrived at a better time for this sequestered reader, a juror in her own right. Several months into quarantine, interfacing with an unjust country from semi-permeable safety of my own solitude, I was turning in on myself, much like the sequestered juror of McClung’s bounded universe writing form poem after form poem. McClung writes in “Superior Court Ghazal,” “okay, so I may be over-/thinking here, but that’s what goes on in our little box.” At this point in time, who isn’t overthinking from her little box?

Some infinities are larger than others, but from where I’m sitting this still means that our small universes are infinite. If free verse is a large infinity, form poems are smaller ones. A villanelle, with its two repeating lines and strict rhyme scheme, seems restrictive, but the eternal lies here too. As poets know, no repetition is the identical. We cannot say the same thing twice. There is freedom to be found in restraint, and if we fold enough times we will soon be ten miles high. 

This brief collection, restrained as it were, shifts voice poem by poem, from the District Attorney to the Public Defender to the Forewoman. Mostly we stick with the perspective of the Sequestered Juror, though, who figures in many forms: a rondeau, a pantoum, a sestina, a cento, a lament. She attempts time and again to order the tragedy at the centre of the book--what justice might be done about the death of a child--as though by organizing she might make sense of the senseless. We catch mere glimpses of the juror’s personhood; only small pieces of her life unfold: her mild attention to the “lanky prosecutor who doesn’t wear a ring,” her affection for her dog Alegria, her literary inclinations. We learn practically nothing of the defendant. 

The chapbook meditates on voice, how difficult it is to restrain our voices, how many of our voices are restrained by society. From the very first poem, “Field Notes, Hall of Justice Parking Lot,” the juror longs to talk with the defendant but must not, for fear of being held in contempt of court. The Public Defender claims of the defendant, “his silence is his right” and later, “his silence is his choice,” though it does not seem like a choice. Meanwhile the Public Defender claims, “but me, I talk a lot,” and it’s unclear whether or not he is pleased with his own speech. An entire poem is composed of notes the juror does not write down; the poem is negative space, an absence, what could have been but was not, was held back. In the cento, she writes, “There are no words in our language to say this,” and yet what follows must certainly be the “this” she is saying. In the lament, speaking is one activity among a list of actions the jurors must not make. In the end, the juror prints her verdict on paper, and ultimately only the Forewoman speaks. At every point there is tension between silence and speech; a poem is never entirely one nor the other. A Juror Must Fold in on Herself builds the infinite into each small box. 

All these meditations on silence, all these linguistic explorations of restraining the voice, all these foldings in on herself, open up into a sonnet crown ominously titled “Summons,” where the narrator seeks advice from her late grandmother, a courthouse stenographer, on how to conduct her legally imposed silence. Here it is the narrator who speaks, despite her enforced silence, while the grandmother, called on for advice, remains silent. Here we truly meet the narrator for the first time, see the fuller fabric of her life intertwined through her grandmother’s, and we see in parallel the humanization of the legal proceedings. The play of the title, the narrator invoking the presence of her dead ancestor and the court requiring one’s presence, emphasizes this entwining.

Though the grandmother does not give advice, the collection ultimately does, ending on two sonnets titled, “Advice for the Ghost Ship Jurors,” addressing the fire that broke out in an artists’ collective in Oakland in 2016 and killed 36 people. These final poems emphasize the jurors’ humanity in the face of mass, senseless tragedy. As readers trapped in my own small boxes, perhaps enduring forced silences of our own, these final poems serve as reminders that we are jurors of mass, mass tragedy. They urge us to expand. While this collection may resonate particularly well in our time of quarantine and a renewed social awareness of injustice, irreconcilable tragedies are a permanent feature of our lives, and McClung’s treatise with these poems is that we must not lose our humanity when we respond to them, and we must never descend into silence.

Learn more about McClung and her work here.

Written by Anna Winham