Almost Invisible

 

 

Kateema Lee’s poems hit hard where poetry matters most, in the gut. The music of her poems is personal as speech, the toughness of her outlook made keener by her tenderness. Unpretentious, genuine, full of life and its sorrows, her vision has breadth and breath, a measure which tracks the distance between the street and the sky. What do we ask of poetry, of art, if not to put us in actual touch with the difficulty of human existence? Kateema Lee’s poems answer that need with craft & cunning; how I admire what they offer us. –Joshua Weiner

When I say that Kateema Lee’s work is illuminating, I mean that it is conveyed with an impeccable ear for sound and sense. I mean that her poems foreground what are often the least looked-upon flowers: veterans and addiction and working hands and women. I mean that they bear witness in the tradition of women who used their voices to establish that what seems almost invisible to much of the world merits recognition as a world itself.” –Keith S. Wilson

The irony of the title of Kateema Lee’s remarkable chapbook, Almost Invisible, is immediately apparent as a reader finds herself in a world, made visible, of blue eye shadow, Jehovah’s Witnesses, a grandmother’s garden, a kitchen beauty shop, and a father’s war stories, all of which Lee renders with a compassionate but unforgiving eye in a taut and supple free verse. –Michael Collier

October 20, 2017