Song of a Reformed Headhunter

More kinds words for CONNOR & SEAL, these from H.L. Hix: "Its architecture is dynamic, and then poem by poem it is elegant and vivid. I especially love "Hi Harlem" and "I Don't Believe in the Long Arc of Justice" and "Strongman from Qinshi Huangdi's Tomb" in the first section, and then the way "form" and "content" (that artificial distinction!) work together in the second section to draw me in and draw me forward is magical."—H.L. Hix Free shipping anywhere if you buy from my indie publishers ! Praise “What are the routes, routines, and disruptions for eros in an all too recognizable dystopia? I feel burnt and humbled by entering the near future hotly projected in this book. Jee Leong Koh’s Audenesque gift for tilting and tipping rhyme and meter creates a craquelure of lines upon these poems’ fine and strong shapes. The fierce sun of his intelligence intervenes to vivify neighbourhood and lovers’ voices in o...

A villanelle is a tricky form to pull off. The challenge is to make the two repetends look inevitable and earned. I I wrote "Novenary with Hens" as part of the Poetry Free-for-all Apprentice Contest. The participants were given a choice of two odd titles. I had to look up the meaning of the word "novenary." Hens reminded me of the time when I was a kid and stepped on one of my chicks. It died on me and I have never had a pet since. While I was writing about this experience, two lines repeated themselves in my head: "I couldn't count to ten till I turned eleven" and "One, two, buckle my shoe, nine and a big fat hen." Surrealistic, rhyming dissonantly, they became the repetends of my poem, an elegy for the deaths of a pet and childhood innocence. Mimi Khalvati's line "No one is there for you. Don't call, don't cry" is the perfect epigraph for the poem. Repetitively in Khalvati's own villanelle, titled simply ...