Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Two astonishing productions, one a play on Broadway, the other a film watched at home. Slave Play by young writer Jeremy O. Harris explores the legacy of slavery through interracial sexual dynamics. So glad that HA told me about it and we went to see it at the Golden Theater on Tuesday. The film was Never Look Away (2018), written and directed by Floran Henckel von Donnersmarck, about a young artist who escaped East Germany to live in West Germany but could not escape the trauma of living under Nazi rule. Play and film, each in its own way, makes me want to write better. To be more truthful. Whether in the two-story mirrors at the Golden or the lightly blurred paintings of amateur photographs.

The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (2020, Pushkin Press). Edited by André Naffis-Sahely. The editor with: Jenny Xie (NYU, Graywolf poet), Aaron Robertson (Lit Hub Editor and translator of Martha Nasibù), Jonathan Galassi (poet and translator, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Sinan Antoon (poet, translator), Jee Leong Koh (poet). Presented by CasaItalianaNYU in collaboration with the Primo Levi Center. September 12, 2019. Purchase: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/the-hea…/9781782274261/

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  I first met Boedi Widjaja at the Dome cafe in the Singapore Art Museum. It was surprising to both of us how quickly we fell into easy conversation. Because of racial tensions in Indonesia in the early 1980's, his parents sent him and his sister to Singapore to live apart from them. He was just nine years old and he did not know a jot of English, having grown up speaking Bahasa Indonesia. Singapore was alienating and he longed for home. At our meeting, I was living away from home too, having transplanted myself from Singapore to New York. Migration is, we discovered, the keynote of my poetry and his art. Both of us are sons of Chinese diaspora who have not just settled in one new place, but having made the place home, have moved again. We are doubly displaced. As our friendship grew, so did our appreciation for each other's work. I attended his art shows in Singapore, where his intensity in live-art ...

"For some reason I cannot pin down, I go to the word “soft” often in my poetry. It does not only speak, it also touches and tastes, and it does all this while meaning, variously, listen, gentle, vulnerable, honest, subtle, strong, tender, comfortable, pre-erection, post-orgasm, receptive, sympathetic, malleable, formal, transformative. It is not the opposite of hard, but is a state of hardness, just as hard is but a state of softness. It appears in conjunction with “ware,” “water,” and “power.”" Pleased to be included in this special Singapore feature of the Portugal-based journal Jogos Florais. Shout-outs in my interview to Tan Pin Pin, Sonny Liew, Gwee Li Sui, Dorothy Wang, Timothy Yu, Jahan Ramazani, and Gina Apostol. And thanks, Marguerita, for sharing your story with me. Your poem has appeared! Poems and interviews by Angeline Yap, Anne Lee Tzu Pheng, Cyril Wong, Edwin Thumboo, Jee Leong Koh, Loh Guan Liang, Pooja Nansi, Shirley Geok-lIn Lim, Tania De Rozario, and...

"Night" was less harrowing than I thought it would be. The stark style is moving, especially when it revolves around the author's "betrayal" of his father, but I miss the exact choice of detail and word that would render the incidents piercing. Even the famous description of the hanging of the child lacks focus, capitalizing as it does on sentimentality. At one point the victim is described as a tall and well-built young man. At another he was a mere child. Having reread George Orwell's essay "A Hanging" recently, I could not help comparing the two. There is nothing in "Night" that compares with the victim's sidestepping of a puddle on his way to the scaffold in Orwell, that unforgettable humanizing detail. "Dawn," a short novel, has a promising premise—a Holocaust survivor becomes a resistance fighter in British-ruled Palestine—but again the the promise was not fulfilled. What plot there is is covered by a thick layer of ...

Weekly column written for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . In view of upcoming elections, New Naratif surveyed Singaporeans on the most important issues facing the country. 447 people responded, and their responses covered not only jobs and cost of living, but also electoral and parliamentary reform, human rights and civil liberties, social discrimination, and foreign policy. Interestingly, as New Naratif points out, no one mentioned religious extremism or deliberate online falsehoods, issues identified by the PAP government as so important as to justify rushed and controversial legislation recently. Now, if you are a Singapore citizen, you can decide which of the 28 issues identified by fellow citizens are most important to Singapore. The goal is to pose these questions to every candidate standing up for election, and to hear their individual stands. Please consider participating in this democratic exercise . Vote with full information. Jee Leong Koh September 5, 2...