"Double Loyalties"

 Lovely review of Steep Tea by Tara Safronoff:

Steep Tea, Jee Leong Koh’s fifth book of poems, is a marvelous, diverse collection united by the epigraphs that begin each poem: brief quotations of women poets and translators. In this way, Koh’s poems respond to a distinctly female literary voice, usually with admiration and fellowship, but sometimes, as in “Ashtrays as Big as Hubcaps,” with resentment. “Ashtrays” quotes Mary Oliver’s “Singapore,” then masterfully rejects the post-colonial condescension of Oliver’s over-earnest metaphor: “The woman scrubbing the big ashtrays with a blue rag,/she was my mother. Her hands were not moving like a river./Her dark hair was not like the wing of a bird.” Koh’s poems are remarkably aware of the divided attentions of many women writers, of the “daughter shifted on/your hip, when you wrote,” of the study door that “kept its ear open to the crib.” The mothers’ double loyalties to the written word, to domestic demands, echo the poet’s expatriate experience: several poems concern the tension between the liberation of elsewhere and the pull of home. In “Singapore Buses are Very Reliable,” the young boy who showed his early desire for freedom by pulling his hand from his mother’s when crossing the street is punished as an adult by his mother’s imagined phone calls: the mother recounts, tediously, the family’s health problems before announcing that she herself is dead; falling from a bus, she reached for but did not hold the handrail, as if to say that she too could snatch her grasp away. One can break off from one’s sterile roots, these poems reveal, but those roots can break from one in return, negating the freedom one sought. Yet other poems suggest a more satisfying merging of worlds, of loves; “In Death As In Life” presents the speaker’s tender, near-erotic expression of his cremation wishes: “I surprise myself by wishing/my ash dispersed/over the sea south of Singapore,/the country I have left behind./That’s too far,/you complain./It’s not, I say. Come August/I’ll show you the exact spot.”