Of Thee I Sing

In his fifth book of poems, Timothy Liu addresses a tripartite “Thee”: the Divine, the Beloved, and the State. A precarious dance between the spiritual and the material ensues, the lyric poem confronting a consumer culture overrun by rampant lust and greed yet finding itself unable to wholly stand outside of what it critiques. Any consolation found herein is short-lived. Even so, by extending the traditions of lyric poetry forward, these utterances seek to enlarge the conversation between art and life, anticipating whatever commerce the future might yet hold.

Publishers Weekly

Liu's attractive fifth book departs from his previous work in its denser style, but not in its themes: intense devotion to gay male desire collides with painful self-scrutiny, political protest and snapshots of far-flung America, from New Jersey (where the poet teaches and lives) to the "red states" and their evangelical demands. Liu tackles these subjects in tough, sometimes fragmentary, free verse, starting with a terse, thoughtful "Ars Poetica": "All the world day-trading suicide shares.... The craft could be taught but not the art." A three-time Lambda Award nominee, Liu (Say Goodnight) still aims to shock ("Let me be your rotisserie Christ"), but those shocks are here aggregated toward a greater cause, as his poetry presses for understandings based on the body ("Flesh knows no future/ but itself, each of us mining a secret dream") and celebrates gay America from backseat to shining sea. One series links the end of a relationship to the expulsion from Eden, "Cruel speech soiling the nuptial bed"; other poems meld a post-Miltonic high style to down-and-dirty reportage, mixing choppy and verbally challenging poems with more fluid, narrative affairs. In Liu's hyperreal nation of passion and distress, "Innocence// means nothing to us now"; decadents and hayseeds join hands and cry out, while "sons who had once studied law// at their father's behest" are "sworn into a cult of moonlit chinoiserie." (Mar.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Timothy Liu's first book of poems, Vox Angelica, received the 1992 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His other three books were finalists for the Lambda Literary Award. Liu, an associate professor of English at William Patterson University, has edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry.