What do you think?
Rate this book
Steep Tea
Steep Tea is Singapore-born Jee Leong Koh's fifth collection and the first to be published in the UK. Koh's poems share many of the harsh and enriching circumstances that shape the imagination of a postcolonial queer writer. They speak in a voice both colloquial and musical, aware of the infusion of various traditions and histories. Taking leaves from other poets - Elizabeth Bishop, Eavan Boland, and Lee Tzu Pheng, amongst others - Koh's writing is forged in the known pleasures of reading, its cultures and communities.
96 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 1, 2015
2 people are currently reading
429 people want to read
About the author
Jee Leong Koh
24 books185 followersJee 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 2022 Singapore Literature Prize in English fiction. He was also shortlisted for the prize for The Pillow Book (Math Paper Press/Awai Books) and Connor and Seal (Sibling Rivalry). His second Carcanet book, Inspector Inspector, was published in late 2022.
Koh's work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Malay, Vietnamese, Russian, and Latvian. Originally from Singapore, Koh lives in New York City, where he heads the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound, the indie press Gaudy Boy, and the journal of Asian writing and art SUSPECT.
Koh's work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Malay, Vietnamese, Russian, and Latvian. Originally from Singapore, Koh lives in New York City, where he heads the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound, the indie press Gaudy Boy, and the journal of Asian writing and art SUSPECT.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
November 26, 2025
After a decade Steep Tea still proves to be a power statement.
Steep Tea is now my favorite of Jee Leong Koh's books. I've been reading him since the old days at Sarah Lawrence and have always been amazed at his preciseness and control. Like the snake in "Eve's Fault," which opens the collection, Koh is a quiet fellow. His poems are quiet, they almost sneak up on you. Read them carefully, over and over. Look in side the lines, the word play, and you will find wonder. These poems speak of myth and memory, of childhood and desire. These poems inhabit a world where everything is and isn't what it appears. The everyday moments, like in "Broccoli" that make the reader pause and hopefully, realize that despite their own hardships, their disappointments, this is their life. It can be beautiful if we let it. And thinking of the lines from Litany "Let our love be as our travel and our work, earning a common currency here on earth."
Steep Tea is now my favorite of Jee Leong Koh's books. I've been reading him since the old days at Sarah Lawrence and have always been amazed at his preciseness and control. Like the snake in "Eve's Fault," which opens the collection, Koh is a quiet fellow. His poems are quiet, they almost sneak up on you. Read them carefully, over and over. Look in side the lines, the word play, and you will find wonder. These poems speak of myth and memory, of childhood and desire. These poems inhabit a world where everything is and isn't what it appears. The everyday moments, like in "Broccoli" that make the reader pause and hopefully, realize that despite their own hardships, their disappointments, this is their life. It can be beautiful if we let it. And thinking of the lines from Litany "Let our love be as our travel and our work, earning a common currency here on earth."
January 23, 2021
Steep Tea, Jee Leong Koh’s fifth book of poems, is a marvelous, diverse collection united by the epigraphs that begin each poem: brief quotations of women poets and translators. In this way, Koh’s poems respond to a distinctly female literary voice, usually with admiration and fellowship, but sometimes, as in “Ashtrays as Big as Hubcaps,” with resentment. “Ashtrays” quotes Mary Oliver’s “Singapore,” then masterfully rejects the post-colonial condescension of Oliver’s over-earnest metaphor: “The woman scrubbing the big ashtrays with a blue rag,/she was my mother. Her hands were not moving like a river./Her dark hair was not like the wing of a bird.” Koh’s poems are remarkably aware of the divided attentions of many women writers, of the “daughter shifted on/your hip, when you wrote,” of the study door that “kept its ear open to the crib.” The mothers’ double loyalties to the written word, to domestic demands, echo the poet’s expatriate experience: several poems concern the tension between the liberation of elsewhere and the pull of home. In “Singapore Buses are Very Reliable,” the young boy who showed his early desire for freedom by pulling his hand from his mother’s when crossing the street is punished as an adult by his mother’s imagined phone calls: the mother recounts, tediously, the family’s health problems before announcing that she herself is dead; falling from a bus, she reached for but did not hold the handrail, as if to say that she too could snatch her grasp away. One can break off from one’s sterile roots, these poems reveal, but those roots can break from one in return, negating the freedom one sought. Yet other poems suggest a more satisfying merging of worlds, of loves; “In Death As In Life” presents the speaker’s tender, near-erotic expression of his cremation wishes: “I surprise myself by wishing/my ash dispersed/over the sea south of Singapore,/the country I have left behind./That’s too far,/you complain./It’s not, I say. Come August/I’ll show you the exact spot.”
September 23, 2018
Tea is that beverage which joins East and West. It serves as the exact cultural metaphor for a poet who spans two hemispheres: the UK and USA on one hand; Singapore and Japan on the other. As the connoisseur of moral literary criticism, Dr Johnson, observed: "tea amused the evening, solaced the midnight, welcomed the morning." Literary taste and tea are fused historically and the awareness is well-infused in Jee Leong Koh's latest work.
There is continuity in this volume of poems with early work, sexual identity, what gay writing might be, a mature understanding of the tensions between cultural history and the individual self, and the place of form in contemporary poetry. There is also a significant change in that Steep Tea is a seasoned work. The poems of Jee Leong Koh are always crafted, in fact meticulous craftsmanship is a hallmark. But these poems have the feeling of being worked at through time. Fine edits have been made during the editorial process and the result is a poetry that is more calculated in its effects on the reader. This tone is rightly sensed by Richard Scott in his review of Koh and McMillan in Ambit. As the most detailed review to date, Scott's review is worth attention, but with some reservations: there is a danger in reviewing two volumes together. Alberto Manguel, bibliophile and lover of reading, correctly points out that "Books are transformed by the sequence in which they are read" (The Library at Night, p.196) and reviewing two books closely together casts odd lights and peculiar shadows. To an enthusiastic review by Scott, some corrections must be made.
According to Scott, Jee Leong Koh, like many gay poets is "adept at hiding" and concealing gayness within poetry. This suggests, unfortunately, that Scott isn't familiar with the previous work. Dissembling has never been a poetic act for Jee Leong Koh, in fact his endeavours in such poems as the sonnet "Come on straight boy", or the monologues in "Hungry Ghosts" or ghazals in "A Lover's Recourse" testify to an open gay awareness, an awareness as evident and deep as the forms it assumes. By reviewing Steep Tea alongside McMillan's interesting Physical, Scott has been drawn into making comparisons, for the sake of critical unity, that aren't valid. Out of all of Jee Leong Koh's published work, Steep Tea is the least lusty and least concerned with political acts of sexual defiance. If anything, Steep Tea is a careful attempt at a volume that isn't over-stewed. (It's publisher, after all, is Carcanet, and they have fitted Jee Leong Koh into a tradition of literary gay poetry including the phallic pens of Neil Powell, Adam Johnson, Edwin Morgan and Gregory Woods). Yes, the word "cock", much-loved by Scott, does appear, also a coy "penis"... hardly an argument for sexy gay poetry. "Koh has a question to ask of the reader – where exactly is the place for homosexual desire within contemporary poetry?" Not really. Not here. Being gay is an honest part of the poetic universe in Steep Tea yet the volume is not a polemic for being gay and an exploration of what gay poetry might be. Scott might have a point if every poem started with an epigram by a historical gay poet. As it is, every poem starts with a quotation from a female poet-- this is a volume about muses. mothers, the matrix of language, the incarnation of words rather than carnality.
The poems in Steep Tea are born from ten years of reflective reading and writing. Gregory Wood's recommendation for the poems wisely observes that the volume upholds reading as "an essential component of human awareness." This spirit frames the poems, their origins in female poets across centuries and their attention to inner worlds of human life. Interestingly, the first poem in this volume, "Eve's Fault", opens from the 1611 edition of Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. That volume itself is structured on a massive Elizabethan conceit: nine women are honoured alongside Elizabeth I; as in Spenser's April Eclogue where the nine muses dance around the Virgin Queen. The muses in Steep Tea exceed 9, yet the principal is the same: the source is the Anima, the Eternal Feminine behind poetic incubation.
The poems crafted by Jee Leong Koh are not variations of other poets or reactions to other poets. The quotations serve as signposts to risings, as Robert Duncan would have phrased it, to points of origins. Each of the forty-six poems begin with an act of reading: the resultant creations aren't reactive fictions or attempts to better the originals. They are, to carry on with Duncan's ideas concerning poetic (gay) creation, extensions of a ground, acknowledgements of the fault-lines where poems break from.
There is much to sip and savour in Steep Tea. As with any volume, a reader will find his own favourites. "Woodwork" is a skilful poem, as Scott asserts, a poem that captures the harshness of a generalised life, and one that turns on the individual and unfitting sexual awareness of a boy with "hands, a shade darker than the wood". The poem is as well-wrought as Hart Crane's "Episode of Hands" in which woodworking and flesh are transforming metaphors. "In his Other House", chosen by Carol Rumens as The Guardian poem of the week, is a beautiful meditation on the library as workshop and history. "The Rooms I Move In" is noticeable for its control of lines and imagery-- a fourteen-line poem in couplets deriving its technique from the ghazal. "The Clocks" has a confident sense of voice change and development. And the consummately phrased "domed/doomed/deem'd" transmutes Renaissance lyric into a modern love poem. With the perception of a pensive melancholic, the poem concludes that "this darkness, is love too". At the close of "Portrait with Blue Shirt", an ekphrastic poem on a portrait of the poet by Valerie Mendelson, one in which colour-spot theory is re-created in simple word-attunements, Jee leong Koh is envisaged as "a young face" not ready for age. There is something of this theme distilling throughout Steep Tea as the author returns to memories of youth and faces the complexities of maturity. Mellower isn't quite the right word to describe Steep Tea, ripened and immersed are closer.
There is continuity in this volume of poems with early work, sexual identity, what gay writing might be, a mature understanding of the tensions between cultural history and the individual self, and the place of form in contemporary poetry. There is also a significant change in that Steep Tea is a seasoned work. The poems of Jee Leong Koh are always crafted, in fact meticulous craftsmanship is a hallmark. But these poems have the feeling of being worked at through time. Fine edits have been made during the editorial process and the result is a poetry that is more calculated in its effects on the reader. This tone is rightly sensed by Richard Scott in his review of Koh and McMillan in Ambit. As the most detailed review to date, Scott's review is worth attention, but with some reservations: there is a danger in reviewing two volumes together. Alberto Manguel, bibliophile and lover of reading, correctly points out that "Books are transformed by the sequence in which they are read" (The Library at Night, p.196) and reviewing two books closely together casts odd lights and peculiar shadows. To an enthusiastic review by Scott, some corrections must be made.
According to Scott, Jee Leong Koh, like many gay poets is "adept at hiding" and concealing gayness within poetry. This suggests, unfortunately, that Scott isn't familiar with the previous work. Dissembling has never been a poetic act for Jee Leong Koh, in fact his endeavours in such poems as the sonnet "Come on straight boy", or the monologues in "Hungry Ghosts" or ghazals in "A Lover's Recourse" testify to an open gay awareness, an awareness as evident and deep as the forms it assumes. By reviewing Steep Tea alongside McMillan's interesting Physical, Scott has been drawn into making comparisons, for the sake of critical unity, that aren't valid. Out of all of Jee Leong Koh's published work, Steep Tea is the least lusty and least concerned with political acts of sexual defiance. If anything, Steep Tea is a careful attempt at a volume that isn't over-stewed. (It's publisher, after all, is Carcanet, and they have fitted Jee Leong Koh into a tradition of literary gay poetry including the phallic pens of Neil Powell, Adam Johnson, Edwin Morgan and Gregory Woods). Yes, the word "cock", much-loved by Scott, does appear, also a coy "penis"... hardly an argument for sexy gay poetry. "Koh has a question to ask of the reader – where exactly is the place for homosexual desire within contemporary poetry?" Not really. Not here. Being gay is an honest part of the poetic universe in Steep Tea yet the volume is not a polemic for being gay and an exploration of what gay poetry might be. Scott might have a point if every poem started with an epigram by a historical gay poet. As it is, every poem starts with a quotation from a female poet-- this is a volume about muses. mothers, the matrix of language, the incarnation of words rather than carnality.
The poems in Steep Tea are born from ten years of reflective reading and writing. Gregory Wood's recommendation for the poems wisely observes that the volume upholds reading as "an essential component of human awareness." This spirit frames the poems, their origins in female poets across centuries and their attention to inner worlds of human life. Interestingly, the first poem in this volume, "Eve's Fault", opens from the 1611 edition of Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. That volume itself is structured on a massive Elizabethan conceit: nine women are honoured alongside Elizabeth I; as in Spenser's April Eclogue where the nine muses dance around the Virgin Queen. The muses in Steep Tea exceed 9, yet the principal is the same: the source is the Anima, the Eternal Feminine behind poetic incubation.
The poems crafted by Jee Leong Koh are not variations of other poets or reactions to other poets. The quotations serve as signposts to risings, as Robert Duncan would have phrased it, to points of origins. Each of the forty-six poems begin with an act of reading: the resultant creations aren't reactive fictions or attempts to better the originals. They are, to carry on with Duncan's ideas concerning poetic (gay) creation, extensions of a ground, acknowledgements of the fault-lines where poems break from.
There is much to sip and savour in Steep Tea. As with any volume, a reader will find his own favourites. "Woodwork" is a skilful poem, as Scott asserts, a poem that captures the harshness of a generalised life, and one that turns on the individual and unfitting sexual awareness of a boy with "hands, a shade darker than the wood". The poem is as well-wrought as Hart Crane's "Episode of Hands" in which woodworking and flesh are transforming metaphors. "In his Other House", chosen by Carol Rumens as The Guardian poem of the week, is a beautiful meditation on the library as workshop and history. "The Rooms I Move In" is noticeable for its control of lines and imagery-- a fourteen-line poem in couplets deriving its technique from the ghazal. "The Clocks" has a confident sense of voice change and development. And the consummately phrased "domed/doomed/deem'd" transmutes Renaissance lyric into a modern love poem. With the perception of a pensive melancholic, the poem concludes that "this darkness, is love too". At the close of "Portrait with Blue Shirt", an ekphrastic poem on a portrait of the poet by Valerie Mendelson, one in which colour-spot theory is re-created in simple word-attunements, Jee leong Koh is envisaged as "a young face" not ready for age. There is something of this theme distilling throughout Steep Tea as the author returns to memories of youth and faces the complexities of maturity. Mellower isn't quite the right word to describe Steep Tea, ripened and immersed are closer.
March 19, 2016
Carefully sculpted; like tracing the spirals of shells and finding a different, intriguing form of life glowing inside each one.
Read
July 3, 2022So, not exactly my poetic cup of tea (sorry), but an interesting read nonetheless. I will forever love Koh's "the first wild strawberry / invites the hummingbirds to lunch" (Steep Tea, 58). Perfection.
I thought some of the most striking entries were "Eve's Fault" and "domed/doomed/deem'd" and "Recognition." It was an effective move to pair each poem with an opening quote, and I found Koh's rebuttal to Mary Oliver's "Singapore" to be apt and warranted.
"I have hope that I will survive the bullfrogs, the mosquitoes, / and even the snares of snake-oil makers, / the hooked nets of usefulness, / because I can look at carp, / my gracious quarrel with the world, / I will survive the depredations of the spirit / and live in what I saw" (Carp Swimming, 49).
I thought some of the most striking entries were "Eve's Fault" and "domed/doomed/deem'd" and "Recognition." It was an effective move to pair each poem with an opening quote, and I found Koh's rebuttal to Mary Oliver's "Singapore" to be apt and warranted.
"I have hope that I will survive the bullfrogs, the mosquitoes, / and even the snares of snake-oil makers, / the hooked nets of usefulness, / because I can look at carp, / my gracious quarrel with the world, / I will survive the depredations of the spirit / and live in what I saw" (Carp Swimming, 49).
November 22, 2016
‘In the interval between sex and poetry lies death’
Born in Singapore to Chinese parents Jee Leong Koh was educated in that former British Colony, still divided into four sectors – British/European, Chinese, Malaysian, and Indian - absorbing the experience of transplantation from his familial background of China with the flavors of Singapore’s multicultural aroma. Early recognized as an exceptional student he traveled to England to read English at Oxford, teaching English in secondary schools before transferring residence to New York to study Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. He currently teaches English in an independent school in New York City while he pursues his life as an award-winning poet.
But enough of the map of this poet’s migration and the changes and adjustments that that manner of maturing has had on his life. Koh writes poems that admix his ethnic matrix with his bilingual facility and adds the element of his sexuality to make some of the more intriguing, brave, at times acerbic, at times needy poems that express not only his own reaction to the cycle of life and love, but also guidelines and seductive comments about traversing the maze of contemporary relationships, especially those of same sex origin.
The Rooms I Move In
I have moved in the rooms of women poets
and, seeing African violets, checked if
they needed water,
careful not to disturb the stolen time in the
chair,
the swivel leather seat, the high cane back.
The desk, if there was one, was bright with
circumstance
cast by an Anglepoise lamp, crooked,
articulate.
The window might look out on an old
monastery
but the door kept its ear open to the crib.
Such rooms I move in when I move
between the men
crowded with desire they disperse in a
stranger’s hand.
Before their face I offer the flower of my
mouth,
red in the red light but also out of the red
light,
a wild hibiscus impossible to label chaste
if my red mouth is not so chastened by my
need.
Jay Leong Koh is an important poet worthy of wide attention.
Born in Singapore to Chinese parents Jee Leong Koh was educated in that former British Colony, still divided into four sectors – British/European, Chinese, Malaysian, and Indian - absorbing the experience of transplantation from his familial background of China with the flavors of Singapore’s multicultural aroma. Early recognized as an exceptional student he traveled to England to read English at Oxford, teaching English in secondary schools before transferring residence to New York to study Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. He currently teaches English in an independent school in New York City while he pursues his life as an award-winning poet.
But enough of the map of this poet’s migration and the changes and adjustments that that manner of maturing has had on his life. Koh writes poems that admix his ethnic matrix with his bilingual facility and adds the element of his sexuality to make some of the more intriguing, brave, at times acerbic, at times needy poems that express not only his own reaction to the cycle of life and love, but also guidelines and seductive comments about traversing the maze of contemporary relationships, especially those of same sex origin.
The Rooms I Move In
I have moved in the rooms of women poets
and, seeing African violets, checked if
they needed water,
careful not to disturb the stolen time in the
chair,
the swivel leather seat, the high cane back.
The desk, if there was one, was bright with
circumstance
cast by an Anglepoise lamp, crooked,
articulate.
The window might look out on an old
monastery
but the door kept its ear open to the crib.
Such rooms I move in when I move
between the men
crowded with desire they disperse in a
stranger’s hand.
Before their face I offer the flower of my
mouth,
red in the red light but also out of the red
light,
a wild hibiscus impossible to label chaste
if my red mouth is not so chastened by my
need.
Jay Leong Koh is an important poet worthy of wide attention.
July 25, 2015
I've been a fan of Koh's work ever since his poems first appeared in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, way back in 2003. I was struck then by the intelligence and (what sounded like -- who knows, right? :) ) honesty, the discipline of the verse -- and these qualities remain (the discipline, if anything, is stronger than ever before, but in a way that liberates the writing and helps it sing). What's new in this collection is an earnest irony in some of the poems -- an apparent paradox, but what better home for paradox than in poetry. i really liked this book, and will be reading it again.
October 23, 2024
‘Attribution’ is when the thoughtfulness hit me. So I went back and understood ‘Recognition.’ I mustn’t be very tired today. It’s a good moment to read Koh’s poetry.
‘Ashtrays as Big as Hubcaps.’ Storytelling….!
‘Reversi’ asks the reader rather than the poet to see a reverse, but it is the poet choosing these images.
‘Temple Art’ violent biological, sculptural beauty.
I wonder if I should revisit Inspector Inspector, makes me glad I’ve held onto it.
‘Ashtrays as Big as Hubcaps.’ Storytelling….!
‘Reversi’ asks the reader rather than the poet to see a reverse, but it is the poet choosing these images.
‘Temple Art’ violent biological, sculptural beauty.
I wonder if I should revisit Inspector Inspector, makes me glad I’ve held onto it.
January 31, 2023
I don't feel qualified to review this book, since I know little about poetry.
But particular standouts were The Xpakinté and the Drunk, Found Poem for its glimpse into the life of a female writer, Bougainvillea, Litany, Carp Swimming, Ashtrays as Big as Hubcaps. My favourite was the titular poem, the renga, for its exquisite imagery.
But particular standouts were The Xpakinté and the Drunk, Found Poem for its glimpse into the life of a female writer, Bougainvillea, Litany, Carp Swimming, Ashtrays as Big as Hubcaps. My favourite was the titular poem, the renga, for its exquisite imagery.
June 3, 2019
Favorites: Attribution, Novenary with Hens, In Death as in Life, Airplane Poems
April 8, 2022
Pretty interesting collection. I'll re-read it gladly.
July 17, 2024
This is a beautiful book of poems. It speaks to the queer and multinational experience in a gorgeous use of language.
November 11, 2015
Solid, personal work from a driven poet. There is a lot to love in this collection.
January 7, 2016
Beautiful. My favourite poem is "Recognition", but as a Singaporean I might be biased. Thoroughly deserves the Financial Times accolade. Looking forward to more already.
April 3, 2019
Favorites: Attribution, Novenary with Hens, In Death as in Life, Airplane Poems
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews