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Inspector Inspector

Jee Leong Koh

Cover of Inspector Inspector by Jee Leong Koh
10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, BAME, LGBTQ+, Second Collections
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (88 pages)
(Pub. Aug 2022)
9781800172227
£12.99 £11.69
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Aug 2022)
9781800172234
£10.39 £9.35
Digital access available through Exact Editions
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize 2024

    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. He has published four other books of poetry, a volume of essays, a collection of zuihitsu, and a hybrid work of fiction. Originally from ... read more
    Awards won by Jee Leong Koh Short-listed, 2024 The Singapore Literature Prize (Inspector Inspector) Runner-up, 2016 Lambda Literary Awards finalist  (Steep Tea)
     'The phrases in Inspector Inspector, themselves all carefully chosen, do not reduce to one refrain, but they do reinforce certain thematic concerns, most prominently the will that applies to all the persons in the book (father, son, lovers, Singaporeans...), and into which I take the reader to be invited: let us remain alive to one another.'
    H.L. Hix, Stride Magazine
    'This is a robust, assured collection from a mature poet with a sound grasp of traditional poetic form - and, crucially, a willingness to experiment with it.'

    Toh Wen Li, The Straits Times

    Praise for Jee Leong Koh 'The Singapore-born poet's first UK publication is disciplined yet adventurous in form, casual in tone and deeply personal in subject matter. Koh's verse addresses the split inheritance of his postcolonial upbringing , as well as the tension between an émigré's longing for home and rejection of nostalgia'
    The Financial Times 28.11.2015 
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