Song of a Reformed Headhunter

So grateful for H. L. Hix's clarifying review of INSPECTOR INSPECTOR in Stride Magazine. He found the throughline in all the poetic sequences of the book. I will be reading his final paragraph again and again with much joy and satisfaction.  "The phrases in Inspector Inspector, themselves all carefully chosen, do not reduce to one refrain, but they do reinforce certain thematic concerns, most prominently the will that applies to all the persons in the book (father, son, lovers, Singaporeans…), and into which I take the reader to be invited: let us remain alive to one another."   If you'd like to get Inspector2:  US: Bookshop.org UK: Carcanet

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...

"What must or might be said now about poetry?" I might have said something to the Progressive Poetics project, initiated and organized by H. L. Hix. The Progressive Poetics project asks each contributor to respond, in light of something she or he has already said in print, to this question:  “Poetry makes nothing happen.” (W. H. Auden, 1939)  “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” (Theodor Adorno, 1949)  Though often cited as timeless, authoritative truths about poetry, those two pronouncements were made at particular historical moments, in particular cultural contexts, and from particular subject positions. But we (choose any “we” from those of us alive now) occupy various subject positions, live in various circumstances, and stand nearer the mid-twenty-first century than the mid-twentieth. It is not self-evident that we should (continue to) defer to Auden and Adorno, so:  What must or might be said now about poetry?