TO THE TUNE
By Jee Leong Koh
July 1, 2026 
ISBN 978-1-958652-27-5
$25.00 / Hardcover / 110 pages / 8.5" x 8.5"
Bench Press, an imprint of Gaudy Boy
Distributed by Asterism, Ingram, and Word Image

“Profound compassion and unerring ear.” 
—Jenny Xie 

All sales proceeds from the book will be donated to the Transformative Justice Collective for their fight against the death penalty in Singapore.

About

In To the Tune, Jee Leong Koh asks Du Fu how poetry can take to the barricades, discovering bracing answers from ordinary citizens, media workers, political organizers, and protest songwriters. 

Koh’s new book juxtaposes a series of searching epistolary poems and a collection of poem-songs that forcibly and tentatively lurch into existence, take on misguided titles, and beg for music to set them chanting and marching.

Author

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 USA. His hybrid work of fiction, Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an insignificant Japanese poet, won the Singapore Literature Prize in English fiction. He was also shortlisted for the prize for The Pillow Book (Math Paper Press/Awai Books), Connor and Seal (Sibling Rivalry), Sample and Loop (Bench Press), and Inspector Inspector (Carcanet). Koh's work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Malay, Vietnamese, Russian, and Latvian. Originally from Singapore, Koh lives in New York City, where he heads the transnational literary organization Singapore Unbound and its publication arm Gaudy Boy. He is also the Poetry Editor of The Evergreen Review.

Praise

“Endowed with fierce moral imagination, Jee Leong Koh’s To the Tune renews our attention to poetry as a dynamic site of invention and resistance, intimate correspondence and rallying cry, and as music that allows us to hear what goes unsaid—or what gets plainly silenced—in the degraded rhetoric that drives exclusionary politics. Koh’s profound compassion and unerring ear furnishes the reader’s faith in what can pass through “ravenous nerves / into poetry,” and there, line by line, suture and hold us together.”
—Jenny Xie, author, The Rupture Tense

“Elite excesses, proletariat protests, autocratic crackdowns, artistic activism. It’s a pattern evident from the Tang Dynasty to modern Singapore and Trump’s America. Like Du Fu, the Tang poet-historian he writes to, Jee Leong Koh is caught in the great contradictions of his time, particularly the ever-shifting bounds of free expression, in both his birthplace of Singapore and his adopted home of New York City. Even as we contend with the tyranny of power and grapple with our own limits, we can still bear witness. Poetry as testimony reminds us of who we were in those moments lost to the grand sweep of history. Koh’s artistic ambition is an inspiration to others.”
—Sudhir Vadaketh, editor, Jom

“Jee Leong Koh has written a book of fierce political lyrics that refuse easy binaries and hold our gaze on many things we would avert our eyes from. Through this work, he argues for, and demonstrates, how art remains an indispensable and inalienable tool that ordinary people have against authoritarian power.”
—Thum Ping Tjin, historian and founder, New Naratif