Michael Leong's poetry career began in the sixth grade when he won his first and only poetry prize in Mr. Harrison's class for a haiku about a snake. Since then, he has received degrees in English and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Rutgers University and has published poems in journals such as Bird Dog, jubilat, Marginalia, Opium Magazine, Pindeldyboz, and Tin House. He is the author of I, the Worst of All (BlazeVOX Books, 2009), a translation of the Chilean poet Estela Lamat. He currently lives in New York City.

Books by Michael Leong:

Other poems on the web by Michael Leong:
Four poems

Michael Leong's Blog.

About e.s.p.:

"Echoing the ludic experimentalists like Lev Rubinstein, Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman, and Christian Bok, Leong darts and weaves through serial litanies, riffs on foreign idioms and cliches, pangrams, magnetic poetry, acrostics, anagrams, concrete poetry, ekphrastics, alliteration, and so on. He has a lot of fun with the array of new forms (often, themselves, older forms but taken at a conceptualist's promixity), which luxuriate in the sound of words, as Stevens once famously wrote, which could hold off the pressure of reality, in "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words."
—Philip Metres

"Open to Surrealism's penchant for lists, sensitive to the absurdities both prevalent and almost hidden from sight, as well as being attuned to the kind of outrageousness that can only be achieved in language...Leong goes his own way...he is beholden to no one."
—John Yau

"These poems are charged with 'tendrilled consequence' and 'aureoled recurrence,' and power up ever-lengthening lines of thought. Leong's poems 'actualize starlit alphabets,' 'transmit / susurrant syllables,' through 'the valves / and shutters, / the vowelled shutters.' e.s.p. doesn't so much read your mind as it offers another mind at work, scrambling in the dark, like the rest of us, searching for some kind of light."
—John Madera