Connor & Seal

Jee Leong Koh

Paperback

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Inspired by Rita Dove's groundbreaking Thomas and Beulah, Connor & Seal is a masterful queering of poetic lineage. With oracular grace and whimsy, these poems innovate the public and private axes of gay love in a tumescent future. We meet Connor, a native Nebraskan and fledgling grant writer, and Seal, a financial analyst from Kingston, Jamaica, as they flummox the space between desire and demise, "the sun again a big orange pill / stuck in the blue throat of the sky." Connor & Seal serves as almanac to a time not far off, of techno-queer bots, state-sponsored violence, and individual resistance. With imaginative dexterity and stylistic flexibility, each poem in Connor & Seal becomes a cipher of the labor of tomorrow's construction: "a bench where two old faggots had to stop," an emblem of a future history, "as quiet as the siren / is alarming."

Book Details

Publisher: Sibling Rivalry Press, LLC
Publish Date: Mar 10th, 2020
Pages: 78
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.27in - 5.83in - 0.19in - 0.25lb
EAN: 9781943977758
Categories: • General• LGBTQ+ Studies - Gay Studies

About the Author

Koh, Jee Leong: - Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by UK's Financial Times, and a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. He has published three other books of poems, Payday Loans (Poets Wear Prada Press, Math Paper Press), Equal to the Earth (Bench Press), and Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (Bench Press), and a collection of zuihitsu, The Pillow Book (Math Paper Press, Awai Books), which was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. His work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Malay, Spanish, Russian, and Latvian. Jee lives in New York City. He is the founder of the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound, which organizes the biennial Singapore Literature Festival in New York City and the monthly Second Saturdays Reading Series, and publishes works of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction through Gaudy Boy.

Praise for this book

"What are the routes, routines, and disruptions for eros in an all too recognizable dystopia? I feel burnt and humbled by entering the near future hotly projected in this book. Jee Leong Koh's Audenesque gift for tilting and tipping rhyme and meter creates a craquelure of lines upon these poems' fine and strong shapes. The fierce sun of his intelligence intervenes to vivify neighbourhood and lovers' voices in our exposed, technologically-reckoned yet still-reckless world."

--Vahni Capildeo FRSL, author of Skin Can Hold

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"Jee Leong Koh's poems dance like drops of oil in a hot skillet. Formally playful yet rooted in the high moral stakes of race and sex, Connor & Seal is a timely reminder that history is made with bodies as much as it's made on them."

--Dale Peck, author of Night Soil and What Burns

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"Connor & Seal is an oddly erotic book that imagines a dim future in which violence is the expectation. And yet, it is still a future where two men--despite every obstacle--still can fall in love. Jee Leong Koh finds new and fruitful use for the quatrain in this brilliant and brilliantly grounded volume."

--Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

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