More Than Mere Light by Jason Koo


More Than Mere Light
Title : More Than Mere Light
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0990703061
ISBN-10 : 9780990703068
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 136
Publication : Published June 12, 2018

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. "No one has written a finer, stranger, more enjoyably various and intelligent long poem than Jason's 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




"This book is about falling, a lot. There are good falls and uncomfortable falls and quiet falls and in-between falls and falling in and out of love with other people and yourself--as Koo aptly writes, 'That was a falling.' Koo is brilliant at mastering the often anxious way we talk to ourselves in our heads, as a way to recall moments and construct memories, justify behavior to oneself, and explore the roles of gender dynamics and sexuality within a world full of distractions in an often strange modern technological landscape. Throughout the collection, Koo is wonderfully narrative, bringing us into the speaker's world, full of jazz and biking and Brooklyn and girlfriends and students and conversations with both an overload of self-consciousness and a lack of it all at the same time ('What's okay, okay?'). The speaker's unabashed ability to be excessive while also having the reader rely on silence, on what isn't told, creates a captivating world for the reader to explore--and most importantly, see themselves fully immersed in as they navigate their own bizarre lives and landscapes. Read it over and over and over again, so you can, as Koo says, drop back 'against the light.'"--Joanna C. Valente

More Than Mere Light Reviews

  • Gabrielle Bates

    This poetry collection reminded me how delightful a book of poems can be. The voice here is candid and wide-ranging, swerving from self-scathing diatribes to glorious sentiment, meditations on class to meditations on hash browns. Disclosing the humor and pain of life as a singular Brooklynite, Koo pulls back the veil that often exists between the making and the made, incorporating—seemingly—it all: intimate (and at times unflattering) details of romantic and sexual life, mundane (yet amusing) domestic routines, the mind in what feels like real time, fixing word to word, thought to syntax, memory to moment. By the end of the collection, the reader feels as if they know Koo (or, at least, his doppelganger on the page) the way one knows their favorite novel protagonists. There’s a baggy expansiveness to the long poem “No Longer See” which I find charming and audacious, a playfulness to the repetitions in the short poem “All All Right” by which I’m both tickled and gutted. This is the kind of book you can, and should, take and read everywhere; pairs well with cappuccinos, sunlit patios, exes, diners, late-night whiskey, public transit, beds.

  • Bird

    If you enjoy the original New York School Poets or wonder what the legacy of Ashbery, O'Hara, and Schuyler looks like today, you must read Jason Koo. More Than Mere Light expands on and elaborates the forms developed by the New York School to embrace a modern city and record that city - and the experience of being a non-white poet and reader. And though the collection's strong embrace of the long poem may be initially intimidating, you're sure to find yourself laughing and nodding along with Koo as he records the city, from construction and cocktails to ordinary pretentiousness and the angst of past relationships. A pleasure with great intellectual challenges from beginning to end.

  • Diana

    A beautiful, urgent collection balanced between immediacy and heartbreaking detachment.

  • Amy Smith

    There's so much to like about this collection that's been touched upon in these reviews. I truly enjoyed how rooted Jason's poems are in Brooklyn during a particular time in his life. The specificity is a point of departure, as in "OK, I know where we are, and when, so now let's explore". Some poems bring out a juvenile humor that, because Jason is so self-aware, has an air of self-acceptance and grounding that's frankly refreshing (I wish more people used poetry in this way). The craft that he brings to poetry is clearly just the tip of the iceburg of his inner work, a craft in itself. Memory-parts branch into related memory-parts and break down into ingredients – coffee, forgetting a charging cable, yoga pants, baseball, guilt, regret, elitism about something you've taken the time to understand better and therefore have become the expert at (e.g., coffee), trying to write a poem – greater than the sum of their parts.