Carcanet online book launch: Inspector Inspector by Jee Leong Koh
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
Join Carcanet Press online to celebrate the launch of Inspector Inspector by Jee Leong Koh, hosted by poet and lawyer Jerrold Yam.
Inspector Inspector develops earlier themes with authority, passion and a sense of possible justice, and struggles with the legacies of fathers, personal, poetic and political.
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.
His first, Steep Tea (2015) was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in the Financial Times, and dialogued with women poets from across the world; Inspector Inspector develops earlier themes with authority, passion and a sense of possible justice, and 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 13 palinodes in the voice of the speaker’s dead father, which he answers when the father’s voice falls silent. Says the publisher: “Jee Leong Koh’s is an inclusive, generous and forgiving imagination, with an enviable mastery of traditional and experimental forms.”
As always with Carcanet Press events, extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to get hold of the new book during and after the event.
