Book Launch | To the Tune by Jee Leong Koh

In To the Tune, Jee Leong Koh asks Du Fu how poetry can take to the barricades, discovering bracing answers from ordinary citizens, media workers, political organizers, and protest songwriters. 

Koh’s new book juxtaposes a series of searching epistolary poems and a collection of poem-songs that forcibly and tentatively lurch into existence, take on misguided titles, and beg for music to set them chanting and marching.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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 by Lambda Literary in the USA. His hybrid work of fiction, SNOW AT 5 PM: TRANSLATIONS OF AN INSIGNIFICANT JAPANESE POET, won the Singapore Literature Prize in English fiction. Originally from Singapore, Koh lives in New York City, where he heads the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound. He is also the Poetry Editor of the Evergreen Review.

IN CONVERSATION WITH

Jerrold Yam is a corporate lawyer and the author of three collections, most recently Intruder (Ethos Books). His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Third Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Washington Square Review. In 2024, he won the Cheltenham Poetry Prize and was a 2024 Writer-in-Residence at the UK’s National Centre for Writing.

Brad Vogel is author of the poetry collections FIND ME IN THE FERAL POCKETS and BROAD MEADOW BIRD. His poetry has been set to music by multiple composers. Brad founded & coordinates NYC Poets Afloat, an annual residency & reading series aboard ships in New York Harbor, as well as the annual Gowanus Dawn Reading, part of the Brooklyn Book Festival (10th annual performance on September 25th!). He leads programs at Brooklyn Museum, NYU, & Center for Fiction. Brad also serves on the Walt Whitman Initiative board and as the Director of Special Projects at Judgy Baby, a new creative hub in Gowanus.