About
In his first full-length collection, Koh speaks with a range of voices—ancestral, recent, and contemporary—and travels a span of ground to investigate the imaginary claims of community and self. At the center of this investigation, as of the book, lies the great question of love.
Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by UK’s Financial Times and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the US. He has published five books of poems, a volume of essays, and a collection of zuihitsu. His work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Malay, Russian, and Latvian. Originally from Singapore, he lives in New York City.
Praise
"Koh is a vigorous, physical poet very much captured by the expressive power of rhythm, rhetoric, and the lexicon. He is also, paradoxically, a poet in pursuit of the most elusive and delicate of human emotions. The contradiction is wonderful and compelling, and so are his poems."
—Vijay Seshadri, author of The Long Meadow
“The voice of Jee Leong Koh is characterised by tension, the interplay of feeling and form. From these two bodies, as with two bodies in love, a sexual, artistic, cultural identity is born.”
—Andrew Howdle, Boxcar Poetry Review
“The subtlety and complexity, the sparkle of Koh’s wit, his awareness of the world around the given relationships (which are not always romantic) frankly beat the living crap out of what one might call the Joanie Loves Chachi School of poetry about relationships…. Koh is a poet not only to watch, but read.”
—Quincy R. Lehr, The Shit Creek Review
“Koh’s formalism serves the poems rather than the other way round. They are extremely well written, moving, pointed, and refreshingly unfashionable (less surreal and elliptical, more complex reality and linguistic precision). His material is often deeply personal and clearly means a great deal to him but he avoids both melodrama and dry distance.”
—Rob A. Mackenzie, author of The Opposite of Cabbage