In his first full-length collection of poems, EQUAL TO THE EARTH, Jee Leong Koh speaks with a range of voices--ancestral, recent and contemporary--and travels a span of ground to investigate the imaginary claims of community and self. At the center of this investigation, as of the book, lies the great question of love.

"Koh is a vigorous, physical poet very much captured by the expressive power of rhythm, rhetoric, and the lexicon. He is also, paradoxically, a poet in pursuit of the most elusive and delicate of human emotions. The contradiction is wonderful and compelling, and so are his poems." -Vijay Seshadri, author of The Long Meadow (Graywolf Press).

"His poems are like the sexy nerd you meet at a bar, the one you really want to get to know better-with his glasses and ties on and nothing else." -Christopher Hennessy, Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets (University of Michigan Press).