*Originally Published in the August 2023 Newsletter* In 1986, the year of Li-Young’s Lee’s debut book, *Rose*, Asian Americans were conspicuously absent from most top honors in poetry. Garrett Hongo would be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, though not until 2014 would Vijay Seshadri win it; as of 2023, no one of Asian ancestry has served as U.S. Poet Laureate. Traditions of East Asian poetry influenced Modernism, the Beats, the Black Mountain school, and individual poets, ranging from Pound to Yeats to Denise Levertov to Gary Synder. Yet, at the same time, Asian writers themselves were largely excluded from postwar American letters, in similarly insidious manners to those that limited Black and Jewish voices. The great Gerald Stern congratulated Lee, in his introduction to *Rose*, for his lack of “ethnocentricity,” despite his “pursuit of certain Chinese ideas.” Apparently, the irony was lost on Stern, a poet for whom the description “cosmopolitan” was often a coded sneer at his Jewishness. But the volume’s focus on Chinese traditions, which Stern may have misperceived as ancestral pride, was perhaps something else entirely. By directing *Rose *at his relationship to his deceased father, Lee situates his collection as a corrective to Pound’s orientalizing—an Asianness rooted in lived experience, and not mistranslated fantasy. To my ear, the elegy “Eating Together” best embodies the collection’s spirit of literary hospitality, inviting readers to a meal that is specific, intimate, and unsanctimonious. Lee’s description of steamed trout waters the mouth: “seasoned with slivers of ginger, / two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.” His poem then pivots from its depiction of the bereaved dining together to the father’s “sleep” that is likened to a “snow-covered road / winding through pines older than him.” This image of the soul’s ascent showcases Lee’s genius at freshening up aging English idiom, by rooting his verse in both Asian and American traditions.