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.