Li-Young Lee is an American poet, born in Indonesia to a Chinese pastor.

Hear him read his poem "The Train Station"; this recording is a bit eerie, but his reading matches the minimalism of his work, which is influenced by Chinese poetry.

The themes that he deals with are of great interest to me--questions of home and place and travel and unity of body and soul. He writes about the effort to remember your origins, which seems to me to be, at least in part, what the doctrine of recollection gets at, and also the question of founding, but at a personal rather than communal level.

He writes also, "I am never done answering to the dead," and shows how his answers to the dead (in this case to his father, who asks him if he's prayed) are not what the dead will always expect (he answers through poetry). This makes me wonder if all we get from the past are questions.