Monday, June 29, 2009



poetry that exerts pressure at every point, and so achieves a momentary rest




Jee Leong Koh
Equal to the Earth


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.

Koh is also the author of Payday Loans, a book of sonnets. His poetry has appeared in Best New Poets and Best Gay Poetry. Born in Singapore, he now lives in New York City, and blogs at Song of a Reformed Headhunter.


6x9, perfect bound, 95 pages, $15.00
preview and buy


"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 (Graywolf Press)


"His poems are like the sexy nerd you meet at a bar, the one you really want to get to know better—with his glasses and ties on and nothing else."

—Christopher Hennessy, Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets (University of Michigan Press)


"Smart, irreverent, often unnerving, these sonnets smirk, smile, argue and bless. Jee Leong Koh has taken a month of days and rendered a very contemporary version of the artist as a young man."

—Marie Howe, on Koh’s Payday Loans



From Equal to the Earth:

Brother


In mother’s womb, we started as a pair of lungs,

sea slugs hanging on to a reef. We grew toe rays,

brain sponges and gonads relaxed by the liquid song.


The Doppler ultrasound echoed our submarine

and found us one. The truth was monozygotic—

we sucked each other’s nub of thumb inside the brine.


When, headfirst, we were unceremoniously expelled,

we were halved like an egg sliced with a line of hair.

A beak plucked at the cord and knotted my navel.


Mother never speaks of you although I know

you were with me at sea. How else to understand

my panic playing hide and seek, the cracked canoe,


wet dreams of touching a man, waking up, a curse

crying, not knowing why, like a turtle washed ashore,

a lacquered carapace—these shimmering absences?




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