SNOW AT 5 PM: TRANSLATIONS OF AN INSIGNIFICANT JAPANESE POET
by Jee Leong Koh
$13.80 / Paperback / 5.5” x 8.5” / 402 pages
Gaudy Boy, September 10, 2020
N. America: Bookshop / Amazon
Singapore: Word Image
Distributed by Ingram

Winner, 2022 Singapore Literature Prize
Necessary Fiction’s Recommended Reading 2020

About

The rescue of a literary manuscript results in a war of words over the interpretation of 107 haiku about New York’s Central Park. In the battle of commentaries, what is at stake is nothing less than the meaning of America in an imaginary but highly plausible future. Reenvisioning Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire for a technologized age, Snow at 5 PM discovers revolutionary uses, and abuses, for literature and history.

Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named as one of the best books of 2015 by UK's Financial Times and a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards in the US. He has published four other books of poetry, a volume of essays, and a collection of zuihitsu. His work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Malay, Vietnamese, Russian, and Latvian. Originally from Singapore, he lives in New York, where he heads the literary nonprofit Singapore Unbound and the indie press Gaudy Boy.

Praise

“Snow at 5 PM is the first instantiation of a new genre, that of tranxfiction, whose characteristics may be summarized thus: transnational, translational, transgender, and transgressive. The 'x' in the name of the genre encapsulates not only the illicit crossing of boundaries, but also the promiscuous multiplication of signifiers. Such works explode the conventional unities of subjectivity, text, and polis. They are 'oscillating guns' set from the start to go off."
—Angel Jefferson, Theorizing the Sign of the Transgender

“Commentary is an ancient art practiced in many cultures around the world. In this novel work, it is revived and reexamined as a means of understanding modernity and ourselves. What Koh reveals is that we comment as naturally as we breathe, that we exist as artfully as we speak."
—Rabbi Saul Barenboim, the Isaac M. Wise Temple

"Koh's haiku are some of the finest in the English language that I have ever read. The prose commentaries are fun, but the haiku are fantastic."
—De-Jing Dao, The Monkey Sage and Other Poems