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...

C&S is born today, but Seal was born in 1983, in Kingston, Jamaica, and Connor in 1990, in Nebraska City, Nebraska. The first Seal poem was written on April 1, 2013, and its first line goes "the cancer sun of the computer screen." The very first Connor poem was written even earlier, on April 10, 2007, as part of a sequence riffing on Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric." So can I say that C&S was 13 years in the making? This is to say that these poems were first part of something else and then they migrated, like Connor and Seal, to another place. Connor and Seal found a new life in New York City, as I did in 2003, and then they found one another and before too long they moved together to Harlem in 2016, as GH and I did in 2017. Fact following fiction. They live in an increasingly unequal and violent New York that I hope we will never see but I wish to imagine as if to anticipate the worst. "And yet," as Jericho Brown writes of C&S , ...