poetry that exerts pressure at every point, and so achieves a momentary rest
Jee Leong Koh
Seven Studies for a Self Portrait
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.
Koh is the author of two other books of poems Payday Loans and Equal to the Earth, the last also published by Bench Press. Born and raised in Singapore, he lives in New York City, and blogs at Song of a Reformed Headhunter.
6x9, perfect bound, 124 pages, $15.00. Buy from Amazon.
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From Seven Studies for a Self Portrait
Study #5: After Frida Kahlo
I dream I am a wreck of a woman.
I am not grand like ruins, I am not a broken column.
I am the traffic accident on morning radio.
A bus handrail is sticking in my uterus like a huge thumbtack.
My collarbone hangs from my throat like a necklace.
I dream a monkey is picking up bits of my spine with his pale hands.
The monkey is carefully arranging me back together.
I hear the Professor say the monkey is the traditional symbol for lust.
My monkey is very gentle.
When he is finished, I will take him to my breast, and offer him my nipple.
Bob Hart
Lightly in the Good of Day
Bob Hart is a joker, a trickster, a gambler. He plays with life for the highest stakes, nothing less than immortality, fullness, significance. Not for him the solemn approach to these ponderous subjects, but the sleight-of-hand to match, and trump, chance, emptiness and transience. A pun, an accident of language, may be endowed by poetry with meaning. In Bob’s hands, a stone may be “a well of things well felt.”
Bob Hart grew up in Harlem, on 145th Street, 142nd Street and 158th Street. He served in the army from 1952 to 1954, and was stationed in Germany during the Korean War. Now he works for a mail sorting company in Midtown West, and lives in Brooklyn. He has a previous small book of poems titled Acrobat. This is his second book.
6x9, perfect bound, 84 pages, $15.00 preview and buy
From Lightly in the Good of Day:
WATERY WITHIN THIS GRAVELED WORLD
Watery within this graveled world,
translucent almost,
thinner than the air,
we move as rarer than our monuments
which we can occupy or not
however crude or well we shaped them;
feeling frail amid solidity
and pinned down by the names which,
large enough to run in an environment,
are points too dot-ephemeral
to pin the powered nowhereness
our talent operates from,
we agree, like entities leaped out from story pages,
to sit, assuming body styles,
disrobed from our invisibility,
with lightnings folded like mosquito's wings
polite in company.
Jee Leong Koh
"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."
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?
