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EUAN KERR: Bao Phi and Ed Bok Lee sit in the banquet room above the Rainbow Chinese Restaurant in South Minneapolis. The place is richly decorated with lacquered screens, dragon-entwined vases, and even a rickshaw. But there is still something solidly Midwestern about the room. The rainbow is in the midst of Ed Bok Lee's stomping grounds.

ED BOK LEE: And I live on this street, Nicollet. I feel like this is like a main artery. It's the only kind of China-- I don't want to say Chinatown, but Asian concentrated business section in Minneapolis.

EUAN KERR: Lee and Bao Phi have lived around here for years. It was just up the street in the 1990s, in a back room at the distinctly German Black Forest Inn Restaurant where their slam collective, Mongrel, rehearsed. Now years later, they are preparing to read together at a publishing party at the Downtown Minneapolis Public Library tomorrow night. These two know each other's work well. As poets, they weigh every word they use. So it's striking to hear what they say about each other. Bao Phi just lays it out.

BAO PHI: With Ed's work, I think he's one of the best poets in the English language. And I think that he is able to write very clearly and with a great deal of poignancy, but in a way that isn't precious, if that makes sense.

EUAN KERR: Lee is equally direct about Phi's poetry.

ED BOK LEE: I think he's, if not the, one of the first poets that raised the hair on my head and all over my body, when I first heard him read. He goes to places that no one else will go.

EUAN KERR: Race, class, gender, nationality, humanity, these are the topics interlaced in Bao Phi's his collection, Song I Sing. This new book contains a series of character poems about people with a common Vietnamese surname, Nguyen. He reads "Changeling," about a young woman with the nickname Cuttie, which can mean different things to different people.

BAO PHI: Cuttie as in cuttie, traitor in a tunnel, rising snake-like from a hole you never expected in the Earth, innocent dirt you could turn your back to. Suddenly now, the slant-eyed succubus stabbing you with a chopstick she took from the bun in her hair. Cuttie, as in never quietly, but seldom heard, as in cuttie, as in who gives a hell what you think anyway. Cuttie, as in everything I need to be. As in, Cuttie is not my name. It should be obvious, but you never asked me.

EUAN KERR: Phi says Asian-Americans often find themselves in the difficult place of being acknowledged by the larger society, but not completely.

BAO PHI: People are very used to the Asian tragedy, the story of our tragic, sorrowful lives, like going through hardship, that type of thing. But people are not quite ready to consume or accept our anger.

EUAN KERR: For his part, Ed Bok Lee finds it troubling that as an Asian-American writer, he's expected to explain his cultural references, a task which White writers seem to have been excused.

ED BOK LEE: I'm not interested in explaining. I'm interested in exploring and discovering.

EUAN KERR: Lee's new collection is called World and explores everything from history, science, and the death of languages, to dreams of winning the lottery. He writes about the Chai Soua Vang case, the hunting season confrontation in Wisconsin between a Hmong man from the Twin Cities and a group of White locals, which left six people dead. And he writes of the love between his parents and compares it with his own and his habit of making iced coffee with condensed milk.

ED BOK LEE: Musical ice cubes in mugs for me and her, as my father once loved to sweeten my own silly tears.

EUAN KERR: Ed Bok Lee and Bao Phi say when they were young, they didn't really think there was a living in poetry, but now were surprised to find perhaps there is. They certainly both intend to continue to write, and perform, and explore. Euan Kerr, Minnesota Public Radio News.