“Endowed with fierce moral imagination, Jee Leong Koh’s To the Tune renews our attention to poetry as a dynamic site of invention and resistance, intimate correspondence and rallying cry, and as music that allows us to hear what goes unsaid—or what gets plainly silenced—in the degraded rhetoric that drives exclusionary politics. Koh’s profound compassion and unerring ear furnishes the reader’s faith in what can pass through “ravenous nerves / into poetry,” and there, line by line, suture and hold us together.”
—Jenny Xie, author, The Rupture Tense
“Elite excesses, proletariat protests, autocratic crackdowns, artistic activism. It’s a pattern evident from the Tang Dynasty to modern Singapore and Trump’s America. Like Du Fu, the Tang poet-historian he writes to, Jee Leong Koh is caught in the great contradictions of his time, particularly the ever-shifting bounds of free expression, in both his birthplace of Singapore and his adopted home of New York City. Even as we contend with the tyranny of power and grapple with our own limits, we can still bear witness. Poetry as testimony reminds us of who we were in those moments lost to the grand sweep of history. Koh’s artistic ambition is an inspiration to others.”
—Sudhir Vadaketh, editor, Jom
“Jee Leong Koh has written a book of fierce political lyrics that refuse easy binaries and hold our gaze on many things we would avert our eyes from. Through this work, he argues for, and demonstrates, how art remains an indispensable and inalienable tool that ordinary people have against authoritarian power.”
—Thum Ping Tjin, historian and founder, New Naratif
