The Coins and the Kirin: Priscilla Lee’s Rituals of Survival in a Modern World
Priscilla Lee’s poetry holds the city and the spirit in one breath. With a clarity that feels earned, her poems balance incense smoke and traffic noise, ritual and the anxiety of the modern world. From the collection Wishbone to pieces like "Prayers to Buddha," "Fortune," and "All My Life," she forges a poetics that neither flees the present nor romanticizes the past, but tests both and keeps what is true.
Ritual against uncertainty
In "Prayers to Buddha," a grandmother lights incense, counts characters, and keeps watch over a child. The ritual is not stage dressing but an operating system for care, treated with both respect and scrutiny. The house is ordinary, but the fears are not; men with heads but no tails lurk at the poem's edge. The grandmother responds with prayer and pattern; Lee, with an almost forensic attention. Devotion builds a perimeter when nothing else will.
Fortune: coins, creatures, and a thinking mind
Each year in "Fortune," five coins fall, an almanac opens, and ancient language arrives. A warrior stands at a crossroad, a carp attempts to leap a high wall, and a kirin enters a once-forbidden city. The grandmother reads these signs with confidence, but the speaker asks harder questions. What is victory for a warrior with no horse or food? Is the carp’s leap ascension or defiance? Who welcomes the kirin, and what does princely fate mean for a woman? The poem stages a negotiation between myth and modern intelligence, subjecting beautiful images to the facts of lived experience. The coins land where chance and will meet, and the mind does not bow; it considers.
The wishbone and the city
The title object of Wishbone contains hope, fracture, and divided desire. Breaking the bone risks loss to claim luck, and the collection understands that every wish has a cost. San Francisco becomes the proving ground. Here, residential hotels, market calendars, music from the Keystone Korner, and the coastal fog are not postcards, but working parts of identity. The city presses on the speaker, forging her strength.
Identity that refuses a script
Lee’s speakers exist at a cultural crossroads and refuse to be reduced to it. In poems like "Peel" and "Chinese Girl in the Mirror," her work challenges those who misread the life before them. A name is more than a label; it is a history and a wager. Praise that values a voice for its Asianness, not its depth, is not praise. These poems insist on an American lineage that traces from a great-great-grandfather who built railroads to a great-great-granddaughter who builds a language equal to that labor.
All My Life: a quiet radical
Lee’s early poem "All My Life" closes with a quiet yet consequential assertion: "I am that much afraid, but I want to believe / I deserve my life and it is mine." These lines do not beg for attention, but they change the terms entirely. The poem acknowledges fear, rejects fatalism, and chooses a purposeful life. This choice, both ethical and aesthetic, offers solidarity to readers who live with fear yet move forward anyway.
Animals, ancestors, and the modern pulse
From porcupines and barracudas to Kuan Yin and ancestral tablets, Lee treats objects and creatures as collaborators, not mere symbols. They test and extend the speaker’s experience. They also carry the modern pulse: phones ring, sirens rise, and a boyfriend in high-tops stands next to a goddess of mercy. The poems accept these odd pairings, finding a credible music for them.
A method for living
Read together, these poems offer a method for living with pressure. They reject the false choice between myth and reason, keeping what heals from ritual and what clarifies from doubt. They show how a woman can inherit a past, argue with it, and still honor it; how a city can be a mentor; and how tenderness can be a form of accuracy.
Recurring emblems
- The coins: chance, pattern, and decision in one gesture.
- The warrior and the horse: courage paired with logistics, victory that must still feed itself.
- The carp: ambition that accepts the bruise. Leap or refuse. Either choice has a cost.
- The kirin: auspice that asks who is allowed to enter, and on what terms, especially for a woman.
- The wishbone: hope that admits fracture and still chooses light.
Place in the canon
Lee’s work is essential to both Asian American poetry and the wider American canon. She carries forward the record of family and migration with care, extending it into metaphysical ground without losing her grip on reality. Her writing, at turns humorous and restrained, widens the scope of lyric truth. Her work has already shaped how later writers think about ritual, city, inheritance, and the right to selfhood.
Conclusion: how the light gets in
Priscilla Lee’s poems let myth and the modern world sit at the same table. The grandmother tosses coins. The city sirens answer. A carp gathers its strength, poised to breach the towering wall. A warrior, steadfast, meticulously examines his mount and provisions. A mythical kirin stands at a threshold, once impassable. Ultimately, the speaker, acknowledging her fear, bravely navigates her life, discovering how vulnerability illuminates the path forward. This enduring truth, the opening of light through courage, is Priscilla Lee's lasting gift within Wishbone.