Poets Wear Prada is a poetry publishing house with excellent poets and affordable books with beautiful covers. Have you had your poetry today?--Meredith Sue Willis, Books for Readers * * * Stylistically, these beautifully designed and produced chapbooks bear their own distinctive signature.--Linda Lerner, SMALL PRESS REVIEW

Monday, March 1, 2010

Jee Leong Koh | Payday Loans





Jee Leong Koh in NYC at The Back Fence on January 15, 2006 (Video by Roxanne Hoffman)



GOOD NEWS


Jee Leong Koh's poem “Brother”, originally appearing in Ledge Magazine, has been selected by Natasha Trethewey for Meridian magazine's 2007 Best New Poets, an anthology to be published by the University of Virginia Press. Each year, Best New Poets sponsored by Meridian and Samovar Press features the work of fifty emerging poets selected from nominations by writing programs, literary magazines, and an Open Internet Competition.



Smart, irreverent, often unnerving, these sonnets smirk, smile, argue and bless. Jee Leong Koh has taken a month of days and rendered a very contemporary version of the artist as a young man. Cash in your paycheck and buy this book.
Marie Howe



...this book refreshes our sense of what can be done in a traditional form when the poet uses his wits and has the wit of Jee Leong Koh.
George Held


Click here to read Held's entire review for Home Planet News



PAYDAY LOANS
by Jee Leong Koh
soft cover/saddle stitched/30 pp.
$10.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)




Credit: Jee Leong Koh




In 2006 the Singaporean government banned the reading of his poem, “Come on, straight boy, and make gay love with me” (from this book) at ContraDiction, the second national gay pride poetry reading. The ban makes Jee Leong Koh out to be more dangerous than he is. Born in Singapore, he read English at Oxford University and studied creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Singaporean anthologies and American journals such as Crab Orchard Review, The Ledge and The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. Based now in New York City, he blogs at http://jeeleong.blogspot.com.





Click my Hypster player to hear me read selections from my chapbook and discuss the book on Art Waves with Host Anne Cammon. (Originally aired on WKCR 89.9 FM NY on Friday August 24, 2007 at 9PM EST.)



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April 10, Sunday

My love is curling dumbbells to his chest
because he thinks I don’t love him enough
and since he thinks I don’t love him enough
my love is curling dumbbells to his chest.
I turn the page of a flesh mag, obsessed
with groping bodies beautiful and buff.
Groping for bodies beautiful and buff,
I turn the page of the flesh mag, obsessed.
My love is groping dumbbells to his chest
to turn his body beautiful and buff
because he thinks I don’t love him enough
since I am curling the flesh mag. Obsessed,
my love is curling as I turn the page,
because he thinks I love a beautiful image.

April 11, Monday

I pound and pound this what-do-you-call-it,
Elliptical, EFX546,
pumping the body all that chemical shit,
shooting morning its new daily fix,
instead of pondering over a new sonnet:
a little song to turn the body cold;
a debt requiring its pound of meat;
a Mini made from an injection mold.
It’s true I haven’t moved although I’ve run
3 miles and, like my writing, I’m as far
from what the mind wants and the mirror sees,
and though it’s true I pound like everyone
on these mass-produced wheels, my chariot-car
signals I’ve lost four hundred calories.

















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