Solar Maximum
Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Praise for Solar Maximum
If Solar Maximum’s speculative fictions are more concerned with presents than futures, its rigorous calm is deeply disquieted, its systematic clarity vying with diffusion, blindness. Is it a reckoning of human success or error that the cannibalistic clouds over Lee’s blanched landscapes are full of weather and information? That they break themselves down as a body and communications must? Why poetry otherwise? These are stunning poems written to haunt a house we’re in the process of building or, in another light, gently dismantling.
— Douglas Kearney
A “great disturbance.” A “magnetic delivery.” Hold your breath in the bathtub:to “alter weather patterns.” To belie: a “longing,” the “discrepancy,” how the light itself accrues a “stop-motion” brilliance in the moment, or era, before it arrives. How does the sun “signal” to citizens and non-citizens below? What is happening? Lee has written a book that melts, freezes, then melts again: a set of “kinetic potentials.” Both syntax and the animal body leave their residues throughout this work, becoming, in turn, modes of fluorescence, exposure, a way to time the “solar maximum.” As Lee writes: “The prints in the ground I track for hours lead me to the place I was taught to call home.” Every page has something on it that was both “severe instant” or “coronal flare.” These extraordinary sentences or lines. But at the same time the work feels grounded in a kind of extraordinary praise for the excruciating beauty of planetary life, even as it— as it does — dissolves.
— Bhanu Kapil
... ablaze, abstract, abstruse, aching, acute, aerial, alien, all-encompassing, alluring, apocalyptic, astounding, beautiful, blinding, brave, cathartic, celestial, cerebral, chosen, cosmic, dazzling, defiant, devastating, diagrammatic, direct, divine, eccentric, economical, eerie, electrifying, elegiac, empathic, excruciating, extraordinary, extrasensory, extreme, fair, fierce, fiery, formidable, furious, futuristic, geometric, ghostly, gorgeous, haunting, human, hurt, incantatory, inspired, intense, jolting, just, keen, kneel-worthy, lightninglike, luminescent, lyrical, magnanimous, magnetic, mysterious, necessary, new, numinous, occult, oneiric, painful, peaceful, phenomenal, phosphorescent, posthuman, prehistoric, quantum, questioning, radiant, raw, relentless, reverential, rhapsodic, righteous, searching, severe, shattering, shimmering, shorn, silencing, singular, spellbinding, stark, sublime, telepathic, timeless, trenchant, unforgettable, unapproachable, uncanny, unearthly, unprecedented, visionary, vivid, vulnerable, weird, wild, wondrous, wrought, xenomorphic, yearning, yonder, zenithal...
— Seo-Young Chu
About the Author
Sueyeun Juliette Lee lives in Denver, Colorado. Her books include Underground National (Factory School Press, 2010), Solar Maximum (Futurepoem, 2015), No Comet, That Serpent in the Sky Means Noise (Kore, 2017), and Aerial Concave Without Cloud (Nightboat, 2022). A former Pew Fellow in the Arts for Literature, she's held international residencies in video art and poetry, and presented work at the Denver Art Museum, Artworks Center for Contemporary Art, Chicago’s city-wide performance arts festival IN>TIME, and the Asian Arts Initiative. Her essays on race, contemporary poetics, trauma, and the avant-garde have appeared with Cambridge University Press, Iowa University Press, The Poetry Foundation, Entropy Magazine, and elsewhere. Find her at silentbroadcast.com
Praise for Solar Maximum
If Solar Maximum’s speculative fictions are more concerned with presents than futures, its rigorous calm is deeply disquieted, its systematic clarity vying with diffusion, blindness. Is it a reckoning of human success or error that the cannibalistic clouds over Lee’s blanched landscapes are full of weather and information? That they break themselves down as a body and communications must? Why poetry otherwise? These are stunning poems written to haunt a house we’re in the process of building or, in another light, gently dismantling.
— Douglas Kearney
A “great disturbance.” A “magnetic delivery.” Hold your breath in the bathtub:to “alter weather patterns.” To belie: a “longing,” the “discrepancy,” how the light itself accrues a “stop-motion” brilliance in the moment, or era, before it arrives. How does the sun “signal” to citizens and non-citizens below? What is happening? Lee has written a book that melts, freezes, then melts again: a set of “kinetic potentials.” Both syntax and the animal body leave their residues throughout this work, becoming, in turn, modes of fluorescence, exposure, a way to time the “solar maximum.” As Lee writes: “The prints in the ground I track for hours lead me to the place I was taught to call home.” Every page has something on it that was both “severe instant” or “coronal flare.” These extraordinary sentences or lines. But at the same time the work feels grounded in a kind of extraordinary praise for the excruciating beauty of planetary life, even as it— as it does — dissolves.
— Bhanu Kapil
... ablaze, abstract, abstruse, aching, acute, aerial, alien, all-encompassing, alluring, apocalyptic, astounding, beautiful, blinding, brave, cathartic, celestial, cerebral, chosen, cosmic, dazzling, defiant, devastating, diagrammatic, direct, divine, eccentric, economical, eerie, electrifying, elegiac, empathic, excruciating, extraordinary, extrasensory, extreme, fair, fierce, fiery, formidable, furious, futuristic, geometric, ghostly, gorgeous, haunting, human, hurt, incantatory, inspired, intense, jolting, just, keen, kneel-worthy, lightninglike, luminescent, lyrical, magnanimous, magnetic, mysterious, necessary, new, numinous, occult, oneiric, painful, peaceful, phenomenal, phosphorescent, posthuman, prehistoric, quantum, questioning, radiant, raw, relentless, reverential, rhapsodic, righteous, searching, severe, shattering, shimmering, shorn, silencing, singular, spellbinding, stark, sublime, telepathic, timeless, trenchant, unforgettable, unapproachable, uncanny, unearthly, unprecedented, visionary, vivid, vulnerable, weird, wild, wondrous, wrought, xenomorphic, yearning, yonder, zenithal...
— Seo-Young Chu
About the Author
Sueyeun Juliette Lee lives in Denver, Colorado. Her books include Underground National (Factory School Press, 2010), Solar Maximum (Futurepoem, 2015), No Comet, That Serpent in the Sky Means Noise (Kore, 2017), and Aerial Concave Without Cloud (Nightboat, 2022). A former Pew Fellow in the Arts for Literature, she's held international residencies in video art and poetry, and presented work at the Denver Art Museum, Artworks Center for Contemporary Art, Chicago’s city-wide performance arts festival IN>TIME, and the Asian Arts Initiative. Her essays on race, contemporary poetics, trauma, and the avant-garde have appeared with Cambridge University Press, Iowa University Press, The Poetry Foundation, Entropy Magazine, and elsewhere. Find her at silentbroadcast.com
