Challenging and Absorbing Read
The gift of being read by someone who has followed your work from the very start. Thanks, Andrew, for this lovely review.
"Jee Leong Koh’s latest book feels like a work that has been waiting to hatch for many years. It is a new departure, Koh has never repeated a concept, but it is, at the same time, a book that brings to focus two longstanding concerns. The first of these is poetic and the second of these is personal.
"Ever since Payday Loans (2007), Koh has been asking a question about poetry: does a poet learn best by inhabiting a set form or by wandering from one form to another? Is life a contained house like Dickinson or an open road like Bishop? The toing and froing can be seen in Payday Loans, a sonnet series, Equal to the Earth (2009), a variety of forms, then back to a series of ghazals in Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (2011). In Connor and Seal, the two threads interweave: Part One adopts highly varied forms; Part 2 adheres to a single form. The result is a book built from loose observations and tight reflections. Taken together, the two parts make a blistering whole. The narrative method glances in the direction of Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah (1986) in which two perspectives are given on a relationship. Mirror faces mirror. And this new book follows on from Steep Tea (2015) where every poem begins with a female muse.
"The second concern relates to identity: how do nationality, gay, and poet coalesce? It is suggested by one of the book’s reviewers that Koh is a follower of Auden. If anything, Koh descends from Gunn’s ancestral tree, for he, no less than Gunn, pursues a belief that a writer must have the freedom to write formally or not, and only when a poet follows a belief that the poem knows its form – the stone knows the form that the sculptor imparts it (Pound) – can s/he have the scope to ask questions about self; and probe the relation of that self, the inside, to society, the outside.
"At the start of Connor and Seal, a timeline is given. This stretches from 1983, the birth of Seal in Jamaica to the death of Connor, in America, in 2066. The book is at once a description of the past and a projection of life into the future – probably, the most challenging aspect of the volume as the reader has to embrace a sexual universe that is science fiction.
"Part one of Connor and Seal is filled with inventiveness, wit and emotion. “A Tale of Two Cities, Three Maybe” is written with sing-a-long bravado:
She’s in love with the boy.
She’s in love with the boy
but after a whole year of suckin’ boner
she knows she’s been conned by Conner.
"“Ackee and Saltfish” is a layered lyric where every syllable is weighed. And “Yellow Leaves (Turing)” is an original dialogue on Shakespearean art between a human artist and an artificial intelligence.
"Part two of Connor and Seal is written in sixty-two quatrains that approximate an ABBA structure. Seal’s vision of life’s new order balances brutal honesty and sensual frankness, one circling into the other like yin and yang. A surreal reality prevails:
the cancer sun of the computer screen
bathes now the dying flower of my face
the indices fall in a coup de grace
or fly up tempting the empyrean.
"The sequence is pulled towards a gravitational centre, the sexual release of an exhausted Seal, then spins off into an apocalyptic climax. The backdrop for Connor and Seal is Harlem. A Harlem that has mutated beyond the gay world of Mckay, Barthè Hughes, Locke and Cullen, into a symbol for America itself, a Harlem that Koh celebrates for its rich diversity. A Harlem of the past, present, and future, a matrix into which Koh projects a relationship that crosses the fraught racial line and asks questions about race, gender, sexuality in Trump's repressive America and in the future.
"Connor and Seal is a challenging and absorbing read, a daring publication by Sibling Rivalry Press, and a truly ambitious work by its author."
"Jee Leong Koh’s latest book feels like a work that has been waiting to hatch for many years. It is a new departure, Koh has never repeated a concept, but it is, at the same time, a book that brings to focus two longstanding concerns. The first of these is poetic and the second of these is personal.
"Ever since Payday Loans (2007), Koh has been asking a question about poetry: does a poet learn best by inhabiting a set form or by wandering from one form to another? Is life a contained house like Dickinson or an open road like Bishop? The toing and froing can be seen in Payday Loans, a sonnet series, Equal to the Earth (2009), a variety of forms, then back to a series of ghazals in Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (2011). In Connor and Seal, the two threads interweave: Part One adopts highly varied forms; Part 2 adheres to a single form. The result is a book built from loose observations and tight reflections. Taken together, the two parts make a blistering whole. The narrative method glances in the direction of Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah (1986) in which two perspectives are given on a relationship. Mirror faces mirror. And this new book follows on from Steep Tea (2015) where every poem begins with a female muse.
"The second concern relates to identity: how do nationality, gay, and poet coalesce? It is suggested by one of the book’s reviewers that Koh is a follower of Auden. If anything, Koh descends from Gunn’s ancestral tree, for he, no less than Gunn, pursues a belief that a writer must have the freedom to write formally or not, and only when a poet follows a belief that the poem knows its form – the stone knows the form that the sculptor imparts it (Pound) – can s/he have the scope to ask questions about self; and probe the relation of that self, the inside, to society, the outside.
"At the start of Connor and Seal, a timeline is given. This stretches from 1983, the birth of Seal in Jamaica to the death of Connor, in America, in 2066. The book is at once a description of the past and a projection of life into the future – probably, the most challenging aspect of the volume as the reader has to embrace a sexual universe that is science fiction.
"Part one of Connor and Seal is filled with inventiveness, wit and emotion. “A Tale of Two Cities, Three Maybe” is written with sing-a-long bravado:
She’s in love with the boy.
She’s in love with the boy
but after a whole year of suckin’ boner
she knows she’s been conned by Conner.
"“Ackee and Saltfish” is a layered lyric where every syllable is weighed. And “Yellow Leaves (Turing)” is an original dialogue on Shakespearean art between a human artist and an artificial intelligence.
"Part two of Connor and Seal is written in sixty-two quatrains that approximate an ABBA structure. Seal’s vision of life’s new order balances brutal honesty and sensual frankness, one circling into the other like yin and yang. A surreal reality prevails:
the cancer sun of the computer screen
bathes now the dying flower of my face
the indices fall in a coup de grace
or fly up tempting the empyrean.
"The sequence is pulled towards a gravitational centre, the sexual release of an exhausted Seal, then spins off into an apocalyptic climax. The backdrop for Connor and Seal is Harlem. A Harlem that has mutated beyond the gay world of Mckay, Barthè Hughes, Locke and Cullen, into a symbol for America itself, a Harlem that Koh celebrates for its rich diversity. A Harlem of the past, present, and future, a matrix into which Koh projects a relationship that crosses the fraught racial line and asks questions about race, gender, sexuality in Trump's repressive America and in the future.
"Connor and Seal is a challenging and absorbing read, a daring publication by Sibling Rivalry Press, and a truly ambitious work by its author."
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