Esther Lee hailing from the American South, lives on a 35’ sailboat with her artist husband, Michael, and their cat, Bowie. A Kundiman fellow, she is the author of the chapbook, Blank Missives, (Trafficker Press) and her debut poetry collection, Spit, which received the Elixir Press Poetry Prize and nominations for the PEN Open Book Award and Pushcart Prizes. Her writing and collaborations with visual artists have appeared in multiple literary magazines and anthologies.

Other poems by Esther Lee in Verse Daily:
April 5, 2011:   "The Real World is Like This:" "My sister's bed's a bird's nest, all edges..."
August 25, 2005:   "from Crossed, Cross, Crossing "Wasn't there something about a sandbag..."

Books by Esther Lee:

Other poems on the web by Esther Lee:
Two poems
Three poems
"The Sea, Overdue For Its Retro-"
"Labanotation #15"

Esther Lee's Website.

About Sacrificial Metal:

"In SACRIFICIAL METAL, Esther Lee dances with astute curiosity and deep tenderness across the shifting grounds of grief, touch, bearing witness, memory, and our obstinate human instinct for future-planning. With great compassion, Lee's poems remind us that everything human eventually unravels, but her poems remind us too that joy is "like tragedy, it occurs--undeniably, relentlessly--every day." Every breath, every dusk, every dinner, every doctor's visit is at once both "tourniquet and artery"--just one of many gorgeous truths revealed in these pages."
—Sean Dorsey

"I see SACRIFICIAL METAL as a collection of letters to the self as though the self were a familiar stranger who speaks all the same languages, and happens to also be a scientist interested in the nature of time. This is a correspondence in which the world, and a person's understanding of its many forms of data, is rigorously contemplated and recorded. "Where am I in your body now," asks a poem. It's a beautiful question, one that bears repeating. Esther Lee writes worthy poetry that reveals a keen mind, as well as a spirit that is as intelligent as it is compassionate."
—Tarfia Faizullah