Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Thanks, John Clegg , for selecting INSPECTOR INSPECTOR (Carcanet, Aug 2022) as one of your Summer Picks 2022, along with new books by Shane McCrae, Stella Benson, Holly Hopkins, and Don Paterson! "Here are six books I’ve either just read or am looking forward to reading this summer: Don Paterson’s best collection since 2003, Holly Hopkins’ long-awaited debut, the follow-up to Jee Leong Koh’s wonderful Steep Tea, an unclassifiable novel / memoir / load of old nonsense from 1933 (republished by the incomparable Boiler House Press), the latest collection from Shane McCrae (which I was very pleased to see nominated for a Forward Prize), and a 12th-century Arthurian romance in Burton Raffel’s lively-looking translation." Read the picks here . You can purchase the book from the London Review Bookshop or from my publisher .

Thanks, Daniele Pantano and your editorial team, for publishing "Inspector Inspector." I'm honored to appear in such good company: Charlie Baylis, Satya Dash, Maria Castro Dominguez, SJ Fowler, Christine E. Hamm, Tom Pickard, Abhijit Singh, Ian Seed, Gregory Vance Smith, Helen Tookey, and Laura Wetherington. And that's just the poets. "Inspector Inspector" is the title sequence of my new Carcanet book, which will be released in August this year.

Weekly column for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . If you can't kill it, I guess you may as well call it Evergreen. Launched in 1957, with work by Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Schorer, and James Purdy, Evergreen Review thrived for 16 years on scandalizing American propriety with audacious writing. Then it went silent for many years before it was revived on-line in 1998, and again in 2017. Now under the leadership of publisher John Oakes and Editor-in-Chief Dale Peck, the magazine has just published the first of four installments of its Fall issue, and is again kicking against the pricks. Headlining the issue is Guatemalan journalist José García Escobar's report on the immigrant caravan traveling from Honduras to the United States. Having embedded himself among the refugees, he was privy to their stories of hardship and to the moral ambiguities of covering them. Looking at the problem from the other end, the American side, Natascha Elena Uhlmann ar...

At Gatwick South Terminal waiting for my Norwegian Airlines plane to Madrid. Last night's reading at the London Review Bookshop must rank as one of the more memorable ones. Tickets were sold out and the bookshop packed with about 80 people. Michael Schmidt spoke about the net of PN Review/Carcanet that welcomes all schools of fish. The first to read, I had a slight sore throat and so paused a couple of times, but carried on like the National Service-trained soldier that I am. The most enjoyable moment for me was to refer briefly to the banning of Lee Tzu Pheng's poem "My Country and My People" from the airwaves because it was deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about nation-building. It was a pleasure to hear the four contributors to New Poetries VI, Rebecca Watts, Joey Connolly-Wright, Vahni Capildeo, and John Clegg. Get the anthology to hear the most exciting poetic voices now in the UK. After the reading, I met Richard Price and enjoyed talking to him. Also spoke ...

"Here are short, deft narratives that map the mismatched patterns of male and female desire grounded in partial understandings of love. The author’s native Singapore sounds out sharply, often ironically, in counterpoint to the intimate domestic interiors that help to constitute what will surely be recognised as some of contemporary poetry’s classic love poems." – David Kinloch My new Carcanet book Steep Tea is now available to pre-order at the special price of £8.00 with free UK postage and packaging. Discount code KOH03 (case sensitive) at checkout .

Well, I debated with myself for a while whether I should have a FB page for my new book. After all, I already have a personal page and an author page, so why inflict another page on the page-weary world? But when I published my second and third books, I did have blogs for them. If I don't have something special for this fifth child, he will be mighty jealous. If you are a parent, you know there will be hell to pay. I have woken up in the middle of the night and heard him whimpering that he is about to meet the world and I don't even have a lousy scrapbook to record his birth. Furthermore, he reminds me in his little yet-to-be-published voice, he is the FIRST book to be brought out in the UK, which makes him rather special, don't I think. And what's more, he is to be published by the renown Carcanet Press. Do I really understand what a big deal this is? This morning I received the final proof from the typesetter's, and I could see the almost fully developed lungs, an...

Wowee! My first-ever advance for a book of poetry! Thank you, Carcanet Press! Photo and tea by Guy.

Thrilled to appear in the same 2015 Carcanet catalogue as Jon Silkin, Elaine Feinstein, Sujata Bhatt, David Morley, Tim Liardet, Tom Raworth, Kate Miller, Sophie Hannah, John Ashbery, Willis Barnstone, Sheri Benning, Les Murray, R.F. Langley, Muriel Spark, and Grevel Lindop.  "Singapore-born poet Jee Leong Koh's first book to be published in the UK is rich in detail of the worlds that he explores and invents as he follows his desire for an unknown other, moving tentatively, passionately, always uncertain of himself. His language is colloquial, musical, aware of the infusion of various traditions and histories. 'You go where? / I'm going from the latterly to the litany, from writs to rites.' The poems share many of the harsh and enriching circumstances that shape the imagination of a postcolonial queer writer. Taking leaves from other poets - Emilia Lanyer, Eavan Boland, Xunka' Utz'utz', Lee Tzu Pheng - Koh creates a text that is distinctively his own...

I can't praise highly enough this first book of poems by Tara Bergin. I'm into my second reading, and it's even more compelling than the first round. Favorites, familiar from PN Review or from New Poetries V , are here--"Looking at Lucy's Painting of the Thames," "Himalayan Balsam for a Soldier," "The Undertaker's Tale of the Notebook," "This Is Yarrow"--but now set in the company of poems that deepen and broaden their resonance. "Acting School" acknowledges the distance between art and life, but brilliantly concludes that "there is a sufficient amount of physical truth" in the former to approximate, and even vivify, the latter. That physical truth I find confirmed, again and again, in the musicality of the verse. It is not drinking water, but in drinking air, poetry comes close to life. The contradictions and tensions in married life are conveyed with nervous, even harrowing, energy. I love the po...