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INTRODUCTION
by Dan "Sully" Sullivan
(Two Time Wicker Park Slam Champion)
Lee is ordinary. And I don’t mean that in a good way. I’ve searched these poems up and down and through the cracks of ink brawling across the
white space for the secret, the key, to this young man’s writing.
I have found nothing out of the ordinary. Read cover to cover and that’s just it…It took me awhile to pinpoint…but it’s his simplistic moment, the every time, the yesterday and today that Lee so eloquently captures the whole of.
It’s a Zen understanding that two minutes in a bookstore can be a thousand paths, an incredible tomorrow, and just as plain as the moment before. He deals with life not with a grain of salt, but the juice from a bitter orange. A thirty case of Old Style and an El train. A Laundromat and a Bears game. A salami sandwich and a bowl of Ramen. A jazz singer and a poet. A street or a page for you, the reader, to walk down.
He puts himself in this series of poems so as to be a recorder and a reflection. This compilation of Chicago working class poems is reminiscent of Sandburg’s Windy City years in its big shoulder curbside observation. If you had just entered the pearly gates of heaven Lee’s poetry would be there, but you’d find this book, a halo with dreams, on heaven’s train tracks contemplating jumping
the ledge and burning all the way down like a Parliament light. So put a buck seventy-five on the transit card and join Lee on the green line train around the loop. When the doors open you’ll be surprised at which stop you jump off.
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