Stories from BOA Readers: #BOATurns40

Walter Benjamin once likened the reading of a book to the lighting of a funeral pyre. The reader, Benjamin says, chases a truth “whose living flame continues to burn over the heavy logs of the past and the light ashes of life gone by.” The best books light a fire, and continue to burn higher and higher as our lives progress. Such books make us confront and better understand our past. They equip and encourage us to work on a better future.

Li-Young Lee's The City in Which I Love You was the beginning of my own poetic journey. As an adopted Asian American, the fragmentation and searching I felt in the title poem resonated deeply with me. This led me on a personal writing journey. Nearly 100 published poems and two chapbooks later, I'm still on that journey. I like to think Li-Young Lee's path opened up my own. I'm currently preparing to write a dissertation on Lee's work, and I teach his poems to the students at my university.

It is an awful lot to ask of a few sheafs of paper filled with words—to change a life. Perhaps more important than actual transformations—though they do occur—is the beauty of a citizenry that holds the belief that such transformations are possible. It is testament to the power of language and to the importance of literary arts—and to publishers, those rare angels who nurse ideas into promulgation. My childhood bedroom also held the family library. I used to fall asleep comforted that I was in the company of some of the most remarkable beings in human history—imaginative or real, if...

One of the first books of poetry I read was Kinnell's Book of Nightmares. All those poems in parts accruing to meaning, the anaphoras, the crazed and yet graceful of collisions of sacred and profound, the wildnesses in "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight" with its mad sounds—"and the stones saying over their one word, ci-gît, ci-gît, ci-gît,"—and its desires—may "lovers no longer whisper to the presence beside them in the / dark, O corpse-to-be ...", I stood forever since in the "café at one end / of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar / where wine takes...

When I was younger it seemed that my parents and I learned English together. My mother used to read to me at night, but more accurately it was a partnership. My mother and I learned a lot of other things together, too: how to play the piano, how to work in a clinic, how to put together college apps—all through my life I have had a companion, and my earliest memories of this companionship begin when we were first learning the language that I would later make my own, as I am now a poet myself.Language, as I learned growing...