Aerial Concave Without Cloud

Aerial Concave without Cloud delivers to us the totalizing realization that all visual information is the consequence of light’s contact with a surface. This witnessing is reciprocal, a consummation of absorption and transmission. “What am I broadcasting at every quivering instant?” a poem asks us. “What information is being so blindly delivered into me?”

As much as Aerial Concave is a book about light, it is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, a book about grief—a grief that is never quite named and that, perhaps because of this, comes to feel almost cosmic in scale, or at least planetary. Much as Boethius found consolation in philosophy, Lee seems to find consolation in geology, ecology, and cosmology. But this consolation comes not from minimizing her personal grief so much as from coming to see it as of a piece with larger geological processes.

Near the end of Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s latest book of poetry, Aerial Concave Without Cloud, she asks two questions from which, it seems, the rest of the collection springs. “I began my inquiry into light, simply: can I decipher a … capacity to translate and speak the light with my living human body? And by doing so, can I relinquish the intensities of an inherited orphan grief?” she writes. This search—for transformation, for relief—unfurls throughout her writing as an ambitious, challenging meditation on language, atmosphere, and the way we make meaning of sensation.

Grief is a lonely process as much as it is all-encompassing. Like all pain, it takes away, gives back wisdom, and breaks people open. Aerial Concave Without Cloud (2022) by Sueyeun Juliette Lee peruses a poet’s journey to research light prompted by the passing of their mother. As they venture to the far-flung corners of Norway and Iceland to study the aurora borealis, the speaker confronts their family’s origin as orphan immigrants of the Korean war. The deeper they dive into research, the more they find that human grief and light converge.

Aerial Concave Without Cloud is very much composed as a book of observation, examining just as much ways of seeing as what might be seen, and the impact of different elements and angles of light, as well as the evolution and impact of time.

Lee’s latest book of poems, Aerial Concave Without Cloud, came into being after she spent the summer of 2014 in Norway engaging deeply with light, but as she writes in the ‘Notes’ sections, she has been a student of light for years, immersed in its historical, scientific, and philosophical understandings.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s latest book, Aerial Concave Without Cloud, is a flash of brightness amidst and understanding of brightnesses, a meditation on light while immersed in light.