Jason Koo
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More Than Mere Light
More Than Mere Light, the third full-length collection from award-winning poet Jason Koo, touches on themes of Asian American identity and sexuality, the difficulties of romantic relationships, and the banalities and triumphs of everyday life in Brooklyn. "No one has written a finer, stranger, more enjoyably various and intelligent long poem than Jason Koo's 'No Longer See,' the central poem in his splendid new book, More Than Mere Light. Schuyler and Knausgaard, Proust and Ashbery, to name just a few, meld into a poetic performance that is joyfully bent, and as gloriously funny as it is self-castigating. Underscoring all this is a sorrowing sense of self that can't shake free of time—time as it drags or stops or flies during romance and sex and the passage from domestic happiness to failure, and as it marks off the progress of a poetry and a life coming into its full, vital strength. With a cool-eyed detachment from his own drama, Koo has written a book that is unforgettable in its candor, its disabused self-knowledge, and its generosity of spirit." —Tom Sleigh
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