Eating Alone, Together: Why I Keep Returning to Li-Young Lee
The first time I read Li-Young Lee’s “Eating Alone,” my father was still alive. I thought it was a nicely made poem—clean lines, humble images, a mood that felt like rain on a weekday. Then my father died, and the same poem opened like a trapdoor. Nothing in it had changed, but everything in me had. The quiet chopping of vegetables, the mindswept yard, the memory of a man working a small plot of ground—all of it began to ring with a frequency I hadn’t been able to hear before. What I once read as restraint I now understood as the way grief actually arrives: not in grand gestures, but in the routines you repeat because you must. Since then, “Eating Alone” has been one of my North Stars. I return to it when I want to feel close to my father, and when I want to be honest about the unremarkable, devastating loneliness men carry and rarely name.
That’s why I’m a fan of Li-Young Lee: he writes the weather inside the body. His poems don’t explain; they reveal. He uses ordinary objects—onions, peaches, bowls, the flick of a knife, the slant of autumn light—to let meaning bloom in the periphery. You think you’re just reading about lunch, or a walk, or a memory, and suddenly you’re in the presence of an ache you recognize but couldn’t articulate. The work makes you feel witnessed without spectacle.
The art of saying less
So much contemporary writing hurries to impress. Lee’s poems are unhurried. He trusts small details and a steady gaze. He understands that silence on the page isn’t emptiness—it’s room for the reader’s life to enter. That’s part of why “Eating Alone” deepened for me after loss: the poem leaves enough space for my father to step into it. I don’t have to be told what to feel; the imagery does the carrying. The meal becomes a ritual of remembrance not because the poem announces grief, but because it lets patience, labor, and hunger stand next to absence and do the talking.
Fathers, tenderness, and the loneliness of men
Lee’s work returns often to fathers and sons, and to the tender, complicated obligations that bind us. What stays with me is how he writes men—not as brutes or stoics or punchlines, but as people whose tenderness survives inside the armor they think they need to wear. “Eating Alone” is, on the surface, about food. Beneath that surface, it’s about the way a father’s habits become the architecture of a child’s life—the way a man keeps showing up in your hands years after he’s gone. When I read the poem now, I feel the loneliness we don’t talk about enough: the solitary labor of keeping yourself going, of feeding yourself, of remembering without dramatizing, of steadying your life when the person who steadied you is gone.
Ordinary objects, extraordinary mercy
Another reason I read Lee is because he sanctifies the common. He writes fruit stands, kitchens, backyards, and family tables with a reverence that never turns precious. He proves again and again that the everyday is already meaningful if you look long enough. That attention is a form of mercy. It gave me a way to carry my grief without making a shrine of it. When I slice vegetables, when I put water to boil, when I step into a yard that has needed mowing for too long, I feel a nearness to my father that isn’t theatrical and isn’t diluted by time. Lee taught me that memory can live in the hand’s small tasks as reliably as it lives in the mind’s big thoughts.
The immigrant key, the human door
Lee’s family history—migration, persecution, faith—threads through his work, but always in service of something more universal. You don’t need to share his biography to recognize yourself in his poems. The door is marked “human,” not “aboutness.” Grief, love, hunger, shame, radiance—he writes them without flinching and without ornament. For me, that’s the highest use of the lyric: to let one life’s particulars open onto a commons large enough for other lives to enter. When I step into his poems, I don’t feel like a tourist; I feel like a neighbor.
Why you should read him
For language that breathes. Lee’s diction is plainspoken but charged. He proves you don’t need verbal fireworks to ignite a reader; a single, accurate image will do more work than a paragraph of posture.
For permission to mourn without performance. If grief has felt too big to narrate, his poems model a way to live with it—quietly, attentively, without apology.
For tenderness that doesn’t blink. His portraits of family, especially fathers and mothers, show affection sharpened by honesty. No pedestal, no takedown—just love as it is.
For the sacrament of the ordinary. He teaches you to notice what’s already there: the plum you wash, the steam that fogs your glasses, the yard that keeps needing you.
For company. There’s a companionship in his lines. You finish a poem and feel less alone, not because anything has been solved, but because someone else has named the weather.
Where to start (and how to stay)
Begin with “Eating Alone.” Read it once like you’re tasting something new. Read it again like you’re remembering an old recipe. Then find “The Gift,” “From Blossoms,” “Persimmons,” “I Ask My Mother to Sing,” and “Eating Together.” You’ll see the same elements recur—food, family, work, memory—but they rearrange into different constellations. If a line tugs at you, let it. If an image lodges in your day, carry it. These poems aren’t puzzles; they’re doors you can open more than once.
And then, if you can, read him the way I do on certain mornings: at a kitchen table, with something simple to eat, with the window cracked. Read him when the house is loud and when it’s too quiet. Read him in your late twenties when loneliness is a kind of weather you pretend you don’t feel, and read him later, when you’ve lost someone you thought you’d never have to live without. Notice how the same poem holds both of you—the younger self and the present one—without contradiction. That’s the enduring gift of Lee’s work: it grows as you do. It keeps finding you where you actually are.
“Eating Alone” still floors me. Not because it shouts, but because it doesn’t. Because it keeps its eyes on the task at hand and lets meaning accrete the way broth gathers flavor—with time, with heat, with whatever you have left in the cupboard. When I read it now, I feel my father’s presence in the smallest gestures—rinsing a bowl, setting a pair of chopsticks down, scraping a cutting board clean. The poem makes a place where memory is not a wound to nurse but a meal to share, even if you’re the only one at the table. That is why I am a fan of Li-Young Lee. That is why I think you should read him.
