Steep Tea (Paperback)
The poems in Jee Leong Koh’s Steep Tea are rich in detail of the worlds 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.
Jee Leong Koh was born and raised in Singapore and moved to New York in 2003. He has a BA in English from Oxford University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. He is the curator of the website Singapore Poetry and the cochair of the inaugural Singapore Literature Festival in New York City. He lives in New York City.
“Koh is a vigorous, physical poet very much captured by the expressive power of rhythm, rhetoric, and the lexicon. He is also, paradoxically, a poet in pursuit of the most elusive and delicate of human emotions. The contradiction is wonderful and compelling, and so are his poems.” —Vijay Seshadri, author, The Long Meadow