The Bees Make Money in the Lion

Poetry. Winner of the 2015 CSU Poetry Center Open Book Competition, Selected by Lesle Lewis, Shane McCrae, & Wendy Xu.

"THE BEES MAKE MONEY IN THE LION is a journey across a dizzying landscape of immigrants and androids, of alien romance and elegies. Here we encounter a language that is both familiar and estranging: phones burble, voices tune by 'auto-fable, ' and we are kicked 'in the essay.' Lo Kwa Mei-en is a formalist trickster: her aubades, sonnets, and pastorals are like none you've ever read before, stuttering with rapid- fire rhymes and repetitions, pulling you through unexpected swerves. Reading this remarkable collection is like 'downloading a copy of a consciousness FAQ, ' finding within it a fractured yet powerful voice. 'Voltas fail' and forms falter, but Lo Kwa Mei-en's poems declare: 'here we are, unhurt nowhere, / editing violence until we dawn.'" Timothy Yu

"If rapture is a dizzy ecstasy brought on by a love no deeper than a hot mouth, then call me taken in and taken over. Lo Kwa Mei- en's THE BEES MAKE MONEY IN THE LION is bawdiness and bombast, a babel of tongues locked and loaded, vowel-drunk and pledging allegiance to the bones of a lion. These downloaded colonists and conquerors masquerading as citizens romance the future, drag you to the edge by your treacherous light. I want to lick these poems from z to a, wear this sonnet crown like a riddled king of this alien kingdom and its honeyed kingdom come." Traci Brimhall

"Lo Kwa Mei-en's second collection rings with 'bravado's vibratto.' Her honeyed roar, itself golden and generously gilding, acknowledges an echo's willingness to submit, and cries 'Lo ' instead: clever reverberation in her 'self- landscape' as she recites 'a fable with no phobia.' Here, the alien non-citizen disassembles the colony by naming its simulacrum of fear in varying degrees of intimacy: the tourist, the migrant, the stranger, the immigrant. This is 'the futurist's job.' In THE BEES MAKE MONEY IN THE LION, the hive serves as metaphor for a postmodern diaspora to be at the mercy of a swarm, compliant within the biblical irresistible, an actor in a dystopian myth disguised as reality. Lo Kwa Mei-en's speaker pledges not to nation but to story. Her exquisite execution of form works to mythify this speaker, rendering her super capable." Ladan Osman"