Inspector Inspector

Jee Leong Koh writes out of the heart of a contemporary reality most readers are familiar with at second or third hand. He writes of political exile and spiritual homelessness; he understands the perils of war, and the perils of certain kinds of peace. Inspector Inspector is his second Carcanet book (Steep Tea was published in 2015 and chosen as a Best Book of the Year in the Financial Times), and it develops his earlier themes with authority, passion and a sense of possible justice. Steep Tea dialogued with women poets from across the world; Inspector Inspector struggles with the legacies of fathers, personal, poetic and political. Threaded through the erotic poems and poems based on interviews with fellow Singaporeans living in America are thirteen palinodes in the voice of the speaker's dead father, which he answers when the father's voice falls silent. Jee Leong Koh's is an inclusive, generous and forgiving imagination, with an enviable mastery of traditional and experimental forms.

Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by the Financial Times and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the United States. He has published four other books of poems, a volume of essays, a collection of zuihitsu, and a hybrid work of fiction titled Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an Insignificant Japanese Poet. Inspector Inspector is his second Carcanet book. Born and raised in Singapore, educated in England, Koh lives in New York City, where he heads the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound.