Koh Jee Leong (b. 1970)
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Jamie Foo
Dated 1 March 2023
In his endorsement of Koh’s Connor and Seal, David Kinloch expresses his admiration toward Koh’s attempt at “pushing the boundaries” of his work, which was “such a different performance from Steep Tea”. The word “performance” is an apt characterization not only of Koh’s latest work but of each of his poetry collections so far, of which include his “bizarre, masochistic challenge” of writing “one sonnet, every day, for thirty days” in his debut collection, Payday Loans (2007), his reworking of ghazals and lyric poems in Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (2011), and finally, his latest departure from the biographical norm where he writes in the voices of his eponymous characters, Connor and Seal (2020).
The variegation across these collections reflect a stylistic virtuosity that has been affirmed by critics and scholars over the past 15 years; Andrew Howdle remarks that Koh’s first full-length collection, Equal to the Earth (2009) reveals his “technical curiosity” (“Review”), while in his latest collection, Anthony Vahni Capildeo comments that Koh possesses an “Audenesque gift for tilting and tipping rhyme and meter”. Henry Ablelove sees in the same poems an echo of “Langston Hughes’ rhyming rhythms” and George Oppen’s cityscape amongst other poetic forebears. (Reviews excerpted, Connor and Seal). Yet insofar as Koh’s collections reflect a variety of styles, their thematic concerns have remained fairly consistent, especially in his first three collections. Koh summarizes it himself in an interview that Seven Studies focuses on looking at “the self through different collective lenses: as a Son, Lover, Poet, homosexual, Singaporean, Chinese and Father” (Ho, “A Gift of Poems”)—preoccupations that Howdle has noted, also form the poetic arc of his earlier full-length collection, Equal to the Earth, which focus on Koh as a person “composed of changing terms: gay, poet, American and Asian”.
On closer reading across collections however, Koh presents different treatments of these concerns over the span of the three collections as he tries to “try to catch [himself] in the mirrors of these categories” rather than “generalize about what the categories mean” (Ho, “A Gift of Poems”). The notion of “catching” is interesting, for it suggests a constant slippage of the gaze even as it is turned towards oneself. Or perhaps, it is an inevitable one, for the “self” that stands refracted against the “forces arrayed against [it]—(neo)colonialism, patriarchy, chaos”, thus rendering self-definition an always already incomplete, improvisatory process (Jogos Florais, “Interviewing Jee Leong Koh”). In Payday Loans, Koh’s first poem already captures this “sense of imminence and impermanence” acutely (Ip, “Preface”), where the poet-persona lays down his struggles as a gay poet struggling to “subsist” in a new city, “leaving school without a job” with an expiring visa and a “boyfriend who doesn’t want [him] to move in yet”—all of which he delves into greater detail throughout the collection (“April 1, Friday”).
In this light, one can perhaps read Koh’s sonnet sequences with their predictable, fixed forms as a reflexive desire to give some provisional shape to his “new life … [that] does not only include the poetic vocation, but also a new identity as a gay man” in New York City (Lantern Review, “A Conversation with Jee Leong Koh”). Yet the formal constraints of each poem cannot hide, and are instead juxtaposed starkly against the wished-for and unfulfilled “aspect of permanence” within the imaginary of the poem, and by extension, the poet-persona’s life. Consider “April 3, Sunday”:
The two of us; pajamas glad bridegrooms
remove the morning afterwards assume
an aspect of permanence. Why hesitate
then when I say I’ll move my stuff to join
The persona details the intimate sequence of how “the mattress conjugates” him and his lover, only to have it undercut by its rhymed counterpart “hesitate” two lines after. These cracks that appear within enclosed rhyme are repeatedly echoed in the sense of contingency that mark the end of the earlier poems in the collection, even as “every sonnet drives towards its final line with an inevitability constrained by length and rhyme” (“Preface”). As seen in the following—
My rucksacks wait. They don’t, won’t, no, can’t rush. (“April 3, Sunday”)
……………………………..
I…quaver to be called,
so I can crash-land at the correct gate.”(“April 4, Monday”)……………………………..
I dictate …
Yes. President and uninsured. (“April 7, Thursday”)
—the tensions between form and meaning in these first week of poems reflect the provisional position of a poet trying to call a new country home. Yet, even if we accept that the “inversion and duality of form and meaning encapsulate a poet out of place” (“Preface”), might these stylistic interventions also paradoxically alert us to the emergence of a poet who is growing to be at home in a poetics that deals with the preliminary and problematic?
Such can be observed in Koh’s experiments with form, emerging in “April 16, Saturday” as the unrhymed word “crack” alerts the reader jarringly to the weight of sentiment that the persona feels at his lover’s acknowledgement. Later, in a similar way, his seemingly irreverent “after lunch poem” gives way to the revelation that he was nervously waiting for news of a job through the course of writing the poem (“April 19, Tuesday”). Ip suggests that some of these poems are “too light for the rigid form that they inhabit” and highlight Koh’s struggle at these moments “not for a lack of craft but for a strength of voice” to complete the sonnet while fulfilling the “spiritual or emotional challenge of saying something true to his own voice”. To look at it another way, these overt conceits also mark Koh’s deliberate choice to reveal the points of pressure that complicate his “pursuit of happiness” in New York (“April 14, Thursday”). This comes to a head when Koh addresses the overlapping roles of “son” and “poet” that he fills; in “April 25, Monday”, Koh writes about receiving a Chinese red packet that his parents had sent him, recognizing that it is a gift “they can’t afford” but one that he “pocket(s)” regardless as his “ambition hustles to fulfil desire”. In a reflexive acknowledgement of his life decision, the poem’s form also reflects as such, where the conventional final couplet of a sonnet reads as the first two lines instead; bearing New Year well-wishes, it further suggests Koh’s desire to successfully chart his own path in poetry.
Often, it is at the intersection of sexual and poetic desire where the poet is at his best; “free from church and state”, Koh’s “chosen course” of poetry (“April 14, Thursday”) is best exemplified in a poem that boldly opens the line “come on, straight boy, and make gay love with me” and continues with audacious, bawdy calls to straight men to “change (their) gears” and give each other “straightforward relief”, rather than waiting for straight sex, which he mockingly compares to the slow baking of cookies (“April 13, Wednesday”). Curiously, Koh sounds like he is presciently addressing Singapore in the subsequent poem when he says, “You read my work for indiscretions, claim them yours, to be used only with permission”, since “April 13” actually ended up being censored in 2006. However, “you” is later suggested to be his censorious lover and Koh’s immediate assertion that he “will still write like a free man” and yet still call for his lover to accept him “with this condition” highlights two things at once – that his commitment to be a free poet can be a struggle, but is a non-negotiable part of his identity that is also intimately tied to his sexuality. Such is the strength of voice that Koh continues to bring to his subsequent work.
Unsurprisingly, Koh’s exploration of the intersections between his sexual and poetic identities occupy a significant part of his first full-length collection, Equal to the Earth. Koh opens this third section with “Blowjob”, which details the different sexual choices between two friends using the extended metaphor of oil rigging; while the poet-persona cruises at sea, “you” already has his “girlfriend of three years…to regulate (his) gusher” (“Blowjob”). Even as Koh admits that the latter is not a “lighthouse for passing ships” like him, one cannot mistake the poet’s attraction to this unnamed friend, not just in his explicit reveal that “your wiry dark limbs were my thrill” but also more tellingly, in the compelling image of strength and stability that he attributes to “you” in the last lines of the poem:
You are exerting a force equal to the earth’s and burning its fuel for a little heat and light
Notably, Koh’s decision to name the titular collection after these lines suggests a blurring of sexual and poetic desire. Could it be that he not only desires “you” but also desires to be “you”, a poet whose words carry weight, who provides a little comfort to his readers? This reading coheres to Koh’s vision of his poetics, insofar as he had articulated in an interview that serious poets should publish work that “build(s) the house of poetry” and it is an “exhilarating realization” when “someone else…has found shelter in our words.
Yet how readers can find “a home in which they can live” in Koh’s poetry is largely a subjective process that may speak little about the quality of the verse; rather, exploring how Koh’s poetry manages to achieve his goal of “exert(ing) pressure at every point, and so achieves a momentary rest” may be a more meaningful and attainable endeavour. (Chin-Tanner, “Self-publishing poetry”). Such can be observed in “Chapter 6: Anal Sex” where Koh uncovers tensions in gay sexual roles within the intimate scene of love-making. The poem opens with his lover’s objection to the work “fuck” as “crude expression of a will to dominate”—a discomfort with language that initially suggests a concern with consent and equality between partner which eventually gives way to thinly disguised misogyny and racism captured in his visceral “recoil” at “the thought of being a female part”, “the rub” being that “these white cheeks belong to you, a man”. Such cracks in the relationship further fail to withstand Koh’s exertion of pressure, who “pressed”, “prodded”, “groped”, “throbbed” and “knocked” his lover for both truth and “vital signs” of love through intercourse, only to cede to the quiet revelation that “lust stops where local will asks it to stop”. The rejection of sexual union then casts a question on whether love is maintained (“Chapter Six: Anal Sex”). Ironically then, by exerting pressure on what it means to be an equal in a relationship, Koh appears to have to reject a momentary rest. Yet the phrase “we know better” in the last lines serve to remind us that for Koh, perhaps this “momentary rest” comes from knowing that the act of exertion in the process of interrogation is right, in order to “shed light on some of the reasons underlying these problems” that prevent the integration of the different categories within himself, and with the world (Zhang, “Critical Introduction”).
The hybridity of histories and identities that Koh is constituted by is also reflected in the melange of styles that Koh writes in throughout the collection. In “Ten Poems on the Plum Blossom”, Koh pays homage to the Qing poet Chen Weisong, by writing about his own young muse who has ransom over his heart, in the style of ten 4-line verses that recall Chinese poetic quatrains. Yet the first verse—
The old branch blossoms in the snow,
pink lips on a low brown bough.
I see your face in the whitewashed hall
And remember home in Singapore.
—immediately locates Koh in the tradition of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”, which notably itself borrows from the Japanese haiku tradition. The last verse again marks Koh’s tribute—or perhaps non-tribute—to the Modernist tradition when he compares himself to a Chinese plum that does not “ripen to a rich blue, delicious, cold and sweet”, which has echoes of William Carlos William’s “This is Just To Say”. The refusal to write in one tradition is mirrored in Koh’s topical focus: while the poems of Section 2 are predominantly located in North America, their on-location meditations also abound with echoes of Asia. “Lachine Canal, Montreal” for instance, relates the history of the fur trade to China. In “Wildwood, Nebraska City”, Koh answers to a passer-by’s question on where he comes from with “New York, instead of Singapore” yet in the next poem “Talk about New York”, Koh reaches the Hotel Peninsula only to think about “home – pasir, bukit, sungei, kuala, pulau”. The rich intersections between American, Asian and Singaporean identities and histories that permeate Koh’s style and content are perhaps best conveyed in the last line of the poem. It addresses the notion of “his new birthplace”, an oxymoron in itself until one realizes that Koh considers leaving Singapore and coming out in New York as giving him a new lease of life. Yet he also admits, “citizenship doesn’t follow coming out”, highlighting his divided affinities to different homes, which accounts for why his “whereabouts are recognizable but never familiar” (“Talk about New York”)– such then can perhaps reflexively account for the hybridity of writing styles that are presented in Equal to the Earth.
In an interview, Koh professes that poetry is the mode through which he puts these “contradictory fragments” of “the world and myself” together. (Conaway, “Cameron interviews poet Jee Leong Koh”) Yet his admission that “when I am writing, I feel I am most myself, making myself up as I go along” is curiously ambiguous, for it suggests a quest for personal integration but also a playful, experimental edge that undercuts the presumption of wholeness and stability (Wong, “A Conversation with Jee Leong Koh”). Such an inherent contradiction in Koh’s poetics is fully expressed in his third collection, Seven Studies for a Self Portrait, the title of which should already give us pause. For it is not “seven self portraits” but rather seven investigations towards, or perhaps even in place of, a portrait that is always deferred; a fitting reminder then that for Koh, he writes not to arrive at a fully-formed outcome but to record the search that “goes forth with an open heart and mind, sometimes grinning, sometimes grave.” (Chin-Tanner, “An Interview with Jee Leong Koh”)
In Seven Studies, this new levity in the search for self comes paradoxically from a turning away from the self, in the sense of moving away from the rigorous introspection that had characterized much of Koh’s first two books, and the dominance of the “I” that came along with it. Which is to say that even when facing the self-portraits of the 7 artists, Koh discovers new ways of seeing, and turns that gaze back to himself in a new light; writing in the voice of Frida Kahlo, he conveys a desire to be broken and restored while through (ironically) appropriating the voice of appropriation artist Yasumasa Morimura, Koh expresses an admiration for his boldness that constantly breaks its own limits. In the third section, “I am my Names”, Koh appears to restore the interrogative gaze back on himself with a focus back on “I”, yet his explorations into the different names that define him only belie a sly smirk, for each poem swerves from straightforward portraiture and merely feints at the/it-self. Consider the poem “M”, which like the other six poems in the section, discloses the secret of the title in the last line:
M.
The world is never what it seems.
It is far more interesting
to guess the secret affinities:the boy and girl sleep side by side,
the lion by the slab of lamb,
the garden’s promise by its rot.
My name is Mystery. I am a homosexual.
The poem’s regular iambic tetrameter, ending with a single line with strong caesura creates an alluring riddle that compels the easy acceptance of the links between the clue (“M”), the name (“Mystery”) and the definition (“homosexual”). A reader of Koh’s work so far will perhaps be surprised, if not incredulous, that in a section that tells the reader this is who “I am”, Koh chooses to reduce the complexities of his sexuality that he has expounded on in great detail thus far, to “secret affinities” with another man (“M”). Re-reading Koh’s departure from the norm in good faith may however lead one to realize that their frustration underscores the consistency of his message –that every definition of the ‘self’ is but a “small halt at a brief station” for a whole that will always exceed representation (“A Lover’s Recourse”).
Held in appositional distance from each other, these two poetic arcs come to their fullest expression in “A Lover’s Recourse”, Koh’s most ambitious project in the final section of Seven Studies where he presents to the reader a series of 49 ghazals, each repeating “the last word in the second line of each couplet, allowing the speaker to mediate over and over, but in different ways, on that one word” in relation to the poet-speaker. In his review, Zhang concludes the ghazals show “there is no one way to apprehend the world”, more accurately perhaps, they also show there is no one way to apprehend Koh (Zhang, “Critical Introduction”). Consider the 9th ghazal, where he switches between different meanings of the word “ring” from nouns to verbs in quick succession, capturing levity (“I learned to make a daisy chain from serious young men stretched out in a scattered ring”), heartfelt longing (“the call is not for me whenever the phones ring”) before ending with an abstract musing on absence (“sick of the road, he sinks thankfully in a room / although too much, Jee thinks, is shut out of the ring”). On the other hand, there are also poems that capture his intense focus on one topic of inquiry, as seen in the 23rd ghazal, where Koh frets over the object of his infatuation who had been silent “for more than a week” in each of the seven couplets.
Recalling Ip’s remarks in Payday Loans that Koh occasionally struggles to fulfil the “spiritual or emotional challenge of saying something true to his own voice” as occasioned by poems that are “too light for the rigid (sonnet) form” (“Preface”), one wonders if the Koh’s true voice is simply that: a coalescence of the light and heavy in content and form. This may occasionally sit uncomfortably for the reader who is confronted with a litany of loosely linked topics, from phone sex (“I stroked my cock to their instructions on the phone”), to a humorous quip on how phones could have averted disaster (“what tragedy can be averted … if Romeo could get Juliet on the phone”) or perhaps, not (“It’s Death, I mean Dad, on the phone”). Likewise, this experimental style may also sit uncomfortably for the close reader of Koh’s oeuvre so far—to read Seven Studies is to go on a lyric journey of defamiliarization that may very well as he says, “renew our hackneyed sense of” of both the world and Koh’s interior world, which in this collection remains one that is only “accessible in glimmers, to words”, its complex truth something that can be felt but not held (“Interviewing Jee Leong Koh”).
This tension between a self-conscious, rigorous inspection of the self and distance from it relents somewhat in the sections, “Translations of an Unknown Mexican Poet” and “Bull Eclogues”, where Koh turns the lyric “I’ away from himself to instead imaginatively speak more for their inspired personas; in the latter, reviewer Liu even notes that the pastor Ted Haggard is “allowed a remarkable amount of lyric beauty in these poems” (Liu, “Only Project”). This new mode of writing comes into full fruition in Steep Tea, where each poem is framed by a prefaced quote from different female poets—34 in all, of various nationalities. The quotations grow to assert their presence on the page, first as working definitions for the corresponding poem—in “Xpakinte and the Drunk”, Koh draws on the quote “The Xpakinte is not really a person, /although it looks like a woman” to compose a corresponding poem on shifting identities—and then more overtly acknowledged as inspiration and its poet as muse. As seen in “What the River Says”, when the quote of choice by Eavan Boland suggests, “The body is a source. Nothing more.”, Koh agrees: “I too compare my life frequently to a river”. (“What the River Says”).
Yet, even as Koh is “inspired and instructed” by these “poetic mothers” (“Mothers, not Muses”), consider too his quiet comeback—
So, if my body is a river, I won’t dismiss it
as a source and nothing more. It is a source
of my voice but it is also my voice: the riveris what the river says on its way to the sea.
—that asserts his independence from his forebears even as he acknowledges his “small hidden beginning” and eventual contribution to their and other bodies of work. Likewise at times, “it is not easy” for the reader to make a connection between the attributed quote and the poem (“Attribution”). Consider for instance, “Reversi, Also Called Othello”, where Koh’s short lyric seemingly responds to a quote from Lee Tzu Pheng’s “Tough, love” that speaks of the difficulty of loving “no matter how many turns/ you make” by exploring enigmatically, the trope of ‘flipping” things around, from coffee, to a coin, to a safety pin. In flipping the original subject matter of the quotes into new formulations in his poems, Koh then reminds the reader that his poems may “owe their existence to the closeness of (poetic) mothers” but it is he who gets “to decide on the terms of (their) engagement”. In a quirky characterisation of these poetic relationships, Koh further suggests that he is able to “(pick) up poetic mothers as quickly as (he) is putting them down”, much like “… flying back to Singapore once a year to visit family. I’m glad to do it and glad to be done with it.” (Koh, “Mothers, not Muses”) Yet if Koh’s poems about his flesh-and-blood mother can count for anything– in “Haibun”, “The Hospital Lift” and “Singapore Buses Are Very Reliable” that each capture a son’s reflections on moments spent with his mother – there is an emptiness to this “illusion of reaching and leaving easily anywhere”. Various mothers have left and will likely continue to leave their fingerprints on his work no matter how fast he “snatch(es)” his hand away from theirs (“Airplane Poems”; “Singaporean Buses Are Very Reliable”).
Steep Tea is a thematic outlier in Koh’s oeuvre, for in his latest work Connor and Seal, he returns to topics of sexuality, relationships, and identity in a foreign land—with a twist. While one can easily read him into the poetic personas of his earlier work, Connor and Seal is entirely fictional, where the 47 poems are split between the voices of the titular characters, each giving a glimpse of their intimate lives against a backdrop of Harlem and its imagined, sombre future. In his review, Thow suggests that this fictional quality “gets in the way of an engagement with the characters” (Thow, “Seeing Double”) but I suggest otherwise—as the reader tracks Connor and Seal’s growing relationship, it becomes clear that one should not look towards the collection for the “realitas” of recorded history but rather for familiar resonances and possibilities. In “Cocktail Napkins” for instance, Koh captures the zeitgeist of (modern) dating through Connor who tries to find Seal after their hook-up at a party through online profiles, and offers his sardonic take when he has Connor realize that Seal is not “on Grindr or other hook-up apps, but he’s on Linkedin”. The affinity between reader and characters deepens when one realizes that Connor and Seal have been made to occupy the same present as the reader – in “The Morning after Trump’s Election (Watusi)”, the opening lines “How to paint the morning after? / The bed holds my hands down. / I’ll soon be jobless.” reflect the shock and panic that many would have experienced in the wake of the American presidential elections in 2016.
Later, even when Koh’s poems depart from the 2020s into an imagined future, it is not an unfamiliar one, insofar as one realizes that it may be prescient in its bleakness. In “Tom’s a-cold” for instance, the latter’s savage death in the hands of “a stranger he had sex with” is juxtaposed against the backdrop of Connor and Seal’s marriage and its seeming promise of societal progress, while in “Returning from the Women’s March in DC”, Koh doubly reveals the emptiness of solidarity movements through Connor’s cold decision to turn his back on two women in a violent catfight. Just as he aptly titles one of his poems, it is hard to “believe in the long arc of justice”, progress and equality in both the imagined world of Connor and Seal and the one in which we exist in right now, seem to require “constant effort and frequent reassertion, and a linear departure from "social inequities" is not guaranteed” (Thow, “Seeing Double”). Weaving in these episodes of cyclical violence and isolation from the quotidian and broader social world into this collection, one cannot help but wonder how it is possible to live without dread. Koh initially seems to suggest that it is impossible; through the character of a boy bot called Newton, he reminds his readers of how lonely the titular characters become. Past their heady romance, they ironically choose to have Newton “in the middle” of their cooling relationship that sadly “also follows/the laws of thermo(nuclear) dynamics”, where the qualification “also” reminds us that like any other isolated system, Connor and Seal‘s relationship ultimately faces entropy to the point of self-destruction; such is the norm for intimate relations in Koh’s sad projection of what it means to live and love in the future (“A New Boy in the House”).
Yet distance may paradoxically also be a kind of saving grace. Looking at the architecture of the collection, the stark cleavage between the Connor and Seal’s respective sections is a reflexive reminder of the distance between them, where Connor’s poems employ a variety of forms and situate him within the given narrative timeline, Seal’s poems are all written in 3 quatrains and read as riddles that bring with them a kind of vigorous life-energy that is refreshingly if also disturbingly different from Connor’s section. From Seal’s poems, one realizes that it is possible to live fully even in dread, as he does in vice, (“their cocks stuffing his sugar mouth and ass … overdosed on prescription medicine”) cynicism, (“the apple once a bit of machinery/for our redemption is now an app”) desire (“his rowboat legs pumping along the dirt / my dick hardens unbearably below”) and finally, hope even as the world burns (“the ducks swim calmly through the burning field / the envelope of day has been unsealed / of man and the long decline of empire”). As one maps Connor’s more palatable poems to Seal’s eviscerating ones to make sense of their world, there is a sense that we as readers are also at once mediating the sadness of disconnection that plagues it, or as Thow puts it more poetically, considering “each side … separately and together” allows us to create “a harmony that is richer and more resonant”.
Zooming out to locate this collection in Koh’s oeuvre, it is probably meaningful to point out that the expectation of such readerly intervention is a fresh element in his work so far, and such mediation is aptly highlighted in the different takeaways of this collection; Henry Ablelove reads it as a snapshot of “post-colonial and post-android dread and pleasure” while Jericho Brown reads it more as hopeful love story, where even in this “dim future in which violence is the expectation…it is still a future where two men – despite every obstacle – still can fall in love” (Review excerpts, Connor and Seal). Reading Connor and Seal then is also a unique experience insofar as the “reader” occupies a more central position in this triangulated relationship between poet, work and text, or as Koh puts it in “The Classical Theater of Harlem”, the only poem in the collection that speaks as a metaphor for writing poetry, the “Self” that presents itself on stage is eventually “upstaged by the audience”. What might this development herald for Koh’s future work? It is unsurprisingly hard to conclude, for what has remained consistent in his work so far is his penchant for experimentation in style, candour at the intimate but also obfuscation for the uninitiated. If his own admission is anything to go by—
Sometimes I think I wrote the words I wrote with such delight.
—it reminds us then that Koh writes to liberate his poetic imagination and to read him is to constantly exist in the same state of enquiry, emotional questioning and hopefully, eventually, resolution in a “momentary rest”.
Works cited
Chin-Tanner, Wendy. “Self-Publishing Poetry: An Interview with Jee Leong Koh”. The Nervous Breakdown. 12 August 2010. Web.
Conaway, Cameron. “Cameron interviews poet Jee Leong Koh.” Examiner.com. 31 March 2011. Web.
Ho, Tammy Lai-Ming and Jason Eng Hun Lee. “A Gift of Poems: An Interview With Jee Leong Koh”. Hyphen Magazine. 10 March 2018. Web.
Howdle, Andrew. “Review: Jee Leong Koh’s Equal to the Earth”. Boxcar Poetry Review. 2010. Web.
Jogos Florais. “Interviewing Jee Leong Koh”. Jogos Florais. September 2019. Web.
Koh, Jee Leong. “Mothers, Not Muses”. The Carcanet Blog. 20 June 2015. Web.
Koh, Jee Leong. Payday Loans. New Jersey: Poets Wear Prada Press, 2007.
- Ip, Joshua. “Preface”. Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2014 (2nd ed).
Koh, Jee Leong. Equal to the Earth. USA: Bench Press, 2009.
- Seven Studies for a Self Portrait. USA: Bench Press, 2011.
- Steep Tea. Manchester: Carcanet, 2015.
- Connor and Seal. Arkansas: Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019.
Lantern Review. “A Conversation with Jee Leong Koh”. Lantern Review Blog. 19 October 2011. Web.
Liu, Nicholas. “Only Project”. Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. 3 July 2011. Web.
Miller, Chloe Yelena. “An Interview with Jee Leong Koh”. Eclectica Magazine. April 2010. Web.
Wong, Jennifer. “A Conversation with Jee Leong Koh”. The Adroit Journal. March 2017. Web.
Thow, Xin Wei. “Seeing Double”. Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. 4 October 2020. Web.
