Timothy Liu’s next book, Luminous Debris: New & Selected Legerdemain (1992-2017), will be out next year. He lives in Manhattan and Woodstock, NY. www.timothyliu.net
Poetry
Winter 2014
The Gift
When his hands were on the wet clay turning on the wheel, I did not ask what he was shaping, whether it was for flowers or wine. It was only […]
Poetry
Winter 2014
Sine Qua Non
Your husband is your future, he says; I’m from your distant past, something on a shelf to look at. I look him over the way one looks at a German […]
Poetry
Fall 2010
Extinguished by a Kiss
The hospitals are emptied of supplies only to find their floors covered in blood. Once again our bank accounts are drained. The remains of a ten-course meal are wheeled back […]
Poetry
Fall 2010
All Trains Are Going Local
Slowing down your body enough to feel. Thought you were at a standstill but you were only slowing down enough to feel the pain. There are worse things than running […]
Poetry
Summer 2005
Another Anxiety Attack
As the lights in the theater dim before they actually dim. So the price-gouged profits of war-torn Iraq. Hiatus or terminus too soon to tell. Withholding forms of control. The […]
Poetry
Spring 2004
Of Thee I Sing
The claim of a hoax more than a hoax underneath our skirts where oceanic musings froth at the mouth—patrons fed up with the Feds still kowtowing to that souped-up pimpmobile […]
Poetry
Spring 2004
On Broadway
The planes in the sky still half empty as ticket sales plummet. At curtain call, Hedda Gabler dusted off the gunpowder from her petticoats before thanking us for coming, a […]
Poetry
Winter 2002
A Sunday Drive
No sense of history in our bones while churches all across the South are torched. An opera critics shun overheard on that gravel road— farm vehicles clogging up the rural […]
Poetry
Winter 2002
Nor’easter Forty Miles Offshore
Above the water bed, a conch's curvaceous pinks enameled into privacy— "for the openings of the body are all mystical openings"— dithyrambs erupting out of drunken bacchanalias two millennia ago […]
Poetry
Spring 2000
For a New Century
The authors have been winnowed. This anthology proves it. A century in the palm of your hand. What to do with the other. Disengaged the clutch the motor revs. The […]
Poetry
Summer/ Autumn 1997
Power
These aren’t the kind of scars he can show in public, obviously, but he’s doing very well … Dr. David Berman Half of the penis remains for a man whose dong […]
Poetry
Summer/ Autumn 1997
The Presence of an Absence in a Midwest Town
Crosses doused with gasoline hotter than a mountain of books burning on a Saturday night where ennui has as many names as churches on the main drag—dandelions across those lawns […]
Asian-American Literature
Spring 1995
Naked
1. A View Of The Garden Do we need alibis? I broke the vase into four rivers. Forgive me. Near the brook, a sweet theatrical rose. Loud. Distracted. […]
Poetry
Summer 1993
Echoes
The world exists again. The roses drop their petals from the railing of a ship and we wave good-bye. An open hand is a hand letting go of flowers in […]
Poetry
Summer 1993
Thoreau
My father and I have no place to go. His wife will not let us in the house— afraid of catching AIDS. She thinks sleeping with men is more than […]
Poetry
Spring 1992
911
We met as blind men, trying to see ourselves, groping for words to suggest an image—a doctor, a lawyer, a student—anything that we weren’t. Yet he did most of the […]
Poetry
Spring 1992
Pornography
There was something appalling about that body, the delicate crease across the skin, the hair falling off the illuminated shoulders no thinner than my mother’s the day I saw her […]
Winter 2014
On Obscenely Yours by Angelo Nikolopoulos
What a mouthful of syllables Nikolopoulos is, joyfully Greek, which is not incidental when considering the obscenities being staged herein page after page.
Remembering 9/11 Web Feature
On Broadway
The planes in the sky still half empty as ticket sales plummet. At curtain call, Hedda Gabler dusted off the gunpowder from her petticoats before thanking us for coming, a […]
Timothy Liu
Timothy Liu’s new book of poems, Don’t Go Back To Sleep, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in fall 2014. He lives in Manhattan with his husband. His poems “The Gift” […]