Dear Bear,

Dear bear, is a collection of letters, a compendium of notes to both the apocalyptic and the paradoxical self. Its setting, the forest, is both physical and metaphorical, and the titular bear real and unreal. The world here is an abstraction—both an inevitable destruction and a romantic conservation.

*Cover artwork by Abigail Reed

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Praise & Reviews

Ae Hee Lee’s evocative epistles in Dear bear are love poems as much for the post-glacial earth she resurrects in the aftermath of a great flood as for the title character with whom the speaker longs to make a home in the forest ‘at the border of every ruin, of every past home.’ — Brenda Cárdenas

Lee rethinks the myths, and she starts this by shedding her own skin, thinking of herself a sea snake. Throughout the book, Lee shapes metaphors and tears them down; one of her gifts to poetry is how she opens the possibility of building on what cannot be whole. — Valerie Mejer Caso

Lee’s Dear bear, is a tantalizing never-ending sequence that makes love on the page, all the while contemporizing the epistolary tradition of literature and emphasizing the importance of ecology. I want to capture all the bursting berries and pear blossoms of this universe. — Dorothy Chan

Rare is the book of poems that hooks you from the dedication page, but ‘For Daniel, to the end.’ captures the irresistibly fatal dart that is Ae Hee Lee’s Dear bear. — Joyelle McSweeney

This chapbook is so beastly resilient, so voluptuous in its elegance, and so passionately written that it could make ‘your biggest secret: your fetish for small feet’ stop hibernating or heighten your sense of smell for Lee’s work. — Vi Khi Nao

Reviews/Interviews

“On Not Killing the Thing You Love” by Lydia Wei in Singapore Unbound

“Letters from a Dying World: A Review of Ae Hee Lee’s Dear bear,” by Leonora Simonovis in The Adroit Journal

“Sundress Reads: Review of Dear bear,” by Abigail Renner in Sundress Blog

“Dear bear,” review by Juniper Jordan Cruz in Cleaver

“A Review of Dear bear by Ae Hee Lee” by Alethea Tusher in Tupelo Quarterly

“‘Maybe the World Had to End So We Could Finally Love’: An Apocalyptic Dream in Letters” Interview w/ heidi andrea restrepo rhodes in Newfound

Excerpts