About
Seven Studies for a Self Portrait, Jee Leong Koh's third book of poems, subjects the self to an increasingly complex series of personal investments and investigations. Ever-evolving, ever-improvisatory, the self appears first as a suite of seven ekphrastic poems, then as free verse profiles, riddles, sonnet sequences, and finally a divan of forty-nine ghazals. The discovery the book makes at the end is that the self sees itself best when it is not by itself.
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
“One of the most ambitious and overlooked book of this year is Jee Leong Koh’s Seven Studies for a Self Portrait…. Intriguingly unobtrusive and obsessive at the same time, Koh’s book grasps the sublime as any other book I've read lately. I truly hope it’s found by more critics as the end-of-the-year retrospective lists are announced, and prizes awarded. This book deserves attention.”
—Steve Fellner, author of Blind Date with Cavafy
“In Seven Studies [Koh] shows that, more than adopting [T.S.] Eliot's pose, he has absorbed and metabolised Eliot's insight. A careless reader may forget that the latter's own project was not really to find stability, but to enact in verse the drama of groping toward it. Koh's poems… provide a fitting reminder….”
—Nicholas Liu, Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore