Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 "Departing significantly from his earlier collection Steep Tea, Jee Leong Koh’s latest work, Inspector Inspector, is an elegiac, yet witty and bold exploration of history, exile and Asian queer identities. Through various forms and narrative, the reader is invited into a variety of spaces: the personal or the intimate, queer spaces of the lover; the everyday for the diasporic community drawing from interviews with Singaporeans living in America; and the elegiac poems in memory of the speaker’s late father."  Thanks, Jennifer Wong, for this lovely review of INSPECTOR INSPECTOR. 

  I will be reading from Inspector2 on Friday, July 7, 7.30-8.30 pm, at Kinokuniya Main Store in Singapore. Jamie Foo will moderate the Q&A. Join us!

Wow! My book is reviewed in this week's TLS, and Jaya Savige seems to like INSPECTOR INSPECTOR very much. I'm especially pleased and grateful that he came to this book after reading STEEP TEA ("majestic"!), CONNOR & SEAL ("capacious imagination"!), and SNOW AT 5 PM ("hefty"?!?). I will shut up now and bask.

Here's a thoughtful and perceptive  review of Inspector Inspector, by Al Lim: "Inspector Inspector is a haunting meditation on death and desire through a father's voice and legacy. Jee Leong Koh's second book at Carcanet Press intersperses several sequences – palinodes written in his dead father Koh Dut Say's voice, gratitude to his poetry mentors, poems based on his sex diaries in New York City, inspections during the Covid-19 pandemic, and life interviews with diasporic Singaporeans. The collection ends with a eulogy – a response to his father's death."

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

  1st review of INSPECTOR INSPECTOR, and it's a positive one. Nice to feel the reviewer Toh Wen Li's genuine enjoyment of the book, not only in the words of praise but also in the generous quotations of the poetry. Nice too to be acknowledged as "openly gay" in the Straits Times, Singapore's main broadsheet, for the first time, I think. I wish there was some mention of the political dimension of the book, but there are insightful descriptions of the different poetic sequences that focus on technique as well as content. Thanks, Toh Wen Li, for this sympathetic review. Oh yes, and thanks for mentioning my hybrid work of fiction SNOW AT 5 PM: TRANSLATIONS OF AN INSIGNIFICANT JAPANESE POET, which is shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. If you are in NYC, come hear me read from INSPECTOR INSPECTOR on Tuesday, August 9th, 6 pm, at the Bryant Park Reading Room, with three other poets. It's free and open to everyone.

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.

Inspector Inspector   The Goldfish Bowl   Supposedly a show of support for medical workers, the banging on pots and pans at exactly 5 pm every day is to scare off the demons. Listen to the hysteria detonating like Chinese firecrackers just beneath the grimness. You can hear it also on the liberal Internet. It has the sadness of dead goldfish floating to the top of the goldfish bowl, or bodies in body bags stacked into refrigerated trucks outside the hospital. Mask up, one health inspector says to another. I can’t breathe, says the Black man locked down by a beast with six knees and hands. I should take to the streets, I say, but what if I catch the virus? I will write instead, in the privacy of 5 am, banging my pot against my pan in this way.   The Zoom Background   The missing person poster was sent to all households in the year of the Great Election. The picture was of my dead father. His face, racked with pain, became the most popular Zoom backgr...

The Zoom Background   The missing person poster was sent to all households in the year of the Great Election. The picture was of my dead father. His face, racked with pain, became the most popular Zoom background, downloaded over a million times around the world. I wrote to the Internet safety bureau every day to ask them to scrub the web clean of the image. I did not wish to share my father with the world. In any case, he was not missing, he was dead. I saw his body pushed into the fire. I dropped his ashes into the sea. Finally, annoyed by my harassment, the Inspector General rained fingers on his keyboard and changed the poster from missing to wanted. The pain on my father’s face now looked sinister. It was downloaded faster than ever, reaching a billion times in China alone.     The Cartoon Tavern   Cheap shots. Surgical strikes. Under the nose of the inner inspector, I have been drinking too much to make up for missed drinks and dinners with friend...

The Quaker Sunflower   Everyone on the show is paranoid, except for the Quaker, who is plain creepy. I have located her creepiness in her calm. While the detective inspectors are dashing all about Dusseldorf, hunting down clues and connections, she gardens at home, pausing to listen to your woes and dispense wise advice. She is a friend to everyone. Her face is round as a sunflower. She reminds me of a certain civil servant in Singapore, met at a roundtable on arts diplomacy. After flashing his PowerPoint slides at us, he took me aside to tell me that he did not understand my unfriendliness towards the National Arts Council. Surely it was better for everyone to have their knives chained to the wall and identified by QR codes? He did not say this, but he could have.   The Harlem Harem   I think I am collecting a harem of birds in Harlem. I am not sure. I must be the most unsure Shah in Persian history. Some days, the birds thrash in the luxurious appointments o...

The Beard Video   My friends are growing beards on Instagram as if they are not afraid of being mistaken for Muslims. They post pictures of the different stages of their growth. They even post time-lapse videos as they are working from home. Finally the man whom I have been stalking since we met at my reading in Kinokuniya also gets into the act. When I watch his video while lying in bed, the cotton sheets rattle quietly and pass their thread count into me, as if I am a curtain of hanging beads easily parted. My body becomes indistinguishable from the Alice blue bed sheet. My face is masked efficiently by the pillowslip. To the facial recognition software and the DNA test, I may as well not be there. When my boyfriend reports me missing, how would the great detective inspector find me? Would he know how to read my phone dropped by my side of the bed?     The Inauguration Poet   According to the regulations, only eight people are allowed in the KTV room....

The Inauguration Poet   According to the regulations, only eight people are allowed in the KTV room. A conspiracy of young foreign women is in attendance. The TV menu presents the following options: a gunman snipes at the President-elect and kills him; a gunman snipes at the President-elect and misses him; the FBI disarms the gunman before he can take up his position on WhatsApp; the gunman is from the FBI. A conspiracy of critics takes down the inauguration poet. They wish to control the narrative. They release a statement that their target is cancel culture, nothing personal. But who is the ninth person in the room? After inspecting his nails, from the left corner he moves to the front, and he sings “Unchained Melody.”     The Mechanical Dog   The mechanical dog does not wish to be mistaken for a real dog. Its long-legged purpose is to scare the citizens of this purpose-built park into wearing their masks. Its eyes, two video cameras, hunt down offend...

The Mechanical Dog   The mechanical dog does not wish to be mistaken for a real dog. Its long-legged purpose is to scare the citizens of this purpose-built park into wearing their masks. Its eyes, two video cameras, hunt down offenders tirelessly. Its yellow body is always on the go. The citizens are, however, unafraid of the dog. They whisk near to the dog and wish to take selfies with it. Look, the citizens say, if you abide by the law, what do you have to be afraid of? The mechanical dog wags its tail in agreement, activated by the inspector looking through its eyes. In a distant galaxy, called Shannara or Harlem, the salt scattered on the icy sidewalk is slowly eating up the concrete. Munch, munch, what’s for lunch?     The Picnic Mat   When they left, the hospital tents in the park had imprinted neat rectangles of dead grass. A paraphrase of what happened. A Morse message, all dashes, no dots. Horizontal smoke signals. QR code. It also reminded me ...

The Body Camera   “You cannot bring the body camera with you to the grave,” says the kitchen inspector. He dips his finger into the batter and tastes it. It is grainy. We are, after all, in the quarterfinals of the Great British Baking Show, where the judgment will be more severe than ever. For the technical challenge, Paul and Mary would like you to bake an anti-terrorism sword. It is a Chinese app and everyone will be required to download it onto their phone. You have two-and-a-half hours. You may remove the gingham covering now. The camera is rolling. The anus remembers.   The Scout Leader   The search in my underwear is unwarranted. I have not had a nocturnal emission since I was fifteen, dreaming that my scout leader was pulling off his shirt and advancing on my vibrating form. Before he could touch me, I was all wet and warm below. But now, whenever I write about the dream, and I am always writing about the dream even when I am not, the beautiful scout leader wears ...

The Scout Leader   The search in my underwear is unwarranted. I have not had a nocturnal emission since I was fifteen, dreaming that my scout leader was pulling off his shirt and advancing on my vibrating form. Before he could touch me, I was all wet and warm below. But now, whenever I write about the dream, and I am always writing about the dream even when I am not, the beautiful scout leader wears the air of an inspector who has a master’s degree in detecting signs of child abuse. His right hand pulses with an ultraviolet light. No matter how hard I write, I cannot change him back. You know him too. The undeniable UFO that blots out sun and rain.   The Bad Prompt   The inspector came to me while I was writing with my writing students because none of them had submitted a poem for workshop. They were a good bunch, but school knocked the stuffing out of them that week. For a prompt, I told them to let one word lead to another. I know. It was not much of a prompt. I had gi...

The Bagel Door   The man behind the counter had a bad night. He banged the brown paper bag of bagels in front of the customer in front of me. I did not know that bagels could make such a smart tap, as if a building inspector was at the door of my apartment. What could I say to the unsmiling caller? My bathroom faucet was leaky? I had no permits for the double-glazed windows? The fire escape had rusted shut before I moved in? No explanation would satisfy the inspector, not even the two dollars that the customer stuffed into the little metal basket between them before waving a cheerful goodbye, whose authenticity was hard to ascertain.   The Ghost Bus   The bus goes past us, and then stops a full length ahead. An inspector, blue-uniformed, hops off, and the bus takes off. It is not our bus. The next bus stops for us, but also stops a full-length before my bus-stop. There is no reason for it, as the bus lane in front of it is blank, as blank as the white spaces between ...

 Started writing a new series of poems tentatively titled "Inspector Inspector." The Ghost Bus   The bus goes past us, and then stops a full length ahead. An inspector, blue-uniformed, hops off, and the bus takes off. It is not our bus. The next bus stops for us, but also stops a full-length before my bus-stop. There is no reason for it, as the bus lane in front of it is blank, as blank as the white spaces between words. There is no reason for my bus to stop there. I walk down the length of my morning bus, and I walk down the length of the ghost bus, wondering how many ghost people are riding it to a ghost destination that I know nothing of. The lights change just in time for me to cross the road, and I look down the full length of the ghost bus, seeing no one, but my morning driver who is looking, I imagine, back at me. It is the first year of the pandemic.   * SNOW AT 5 PM has a French fan! His review on Amazon , translated from French into E...