ABOUT THIS BOOK

Running the gamut from traditional to radical forms, Timothy Liu’s sixth collection of poems, For Dust Thou Art, continues the trajectory of his previous books but extends his lyrical range. The centerpiece of the volume’s tripartite structure is a meditation on the events surrounding 9/11 and its aftermath. In his poems, Liu explores what a twenty-first century American “poetry of witness” might look like and protests the charge that the poetic generation to which Liu belongs is stymied by a kind of jaded amorality. Whether taking on public spectacle or contemplating the fallout of a private life, these meditations move forward and backward through time, seeking spiritual consolation within a material world.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Timothy Liu, an associate professor of English at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., has published poems in numerous journals and is the author of five previous collections of poetry. Of Thee I Sing was selected as a 2004 Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and a co-winner of the Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series Competition. Vox Angelica received the 1992 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the editor of Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. Liu’s papers and journals are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

REVIEWS

“Timothy Liu is too often reduced to being a poet of sexual audacity. He is audacious, but perhaps in his baroque architecture, his fluency, his intricacy, and his unwillingness to reduce himself by dogma or theory or design. I love his growing, growling work, and his violent soft hints about the whole body politic in progressive zooms. Nothing is more learned than these fugues of ideas, these ‘racing thoughts.’ Moreover, because he is such a builder, some will be attracted to one window or one door and find single joys throughout. But the permanent, complicated delight is Liu’s poetry itself: uncontrollable melancholy and music.” —David Shapiro, author of A Burning Interior and Mondrian: Flowers

— -

“Liu excels at the short oracular lyric that seems to erupt from a primal cave, whether a pagan sybil’s or that of St. John upon Patmos. He is like an unnervingly wise child singing in the presence of elders who grow less skeptical and more awed by the minute.”—Harvard Review

— -

“A gifted poet, an apostate who cannot stop praying, Liu strives to make secular sacraments out of actual experience, creating outward signs of inward grace.” —Library Journal

— -

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
 One
 Tributaries 00
 Revival 00
 Low Tide 00
 Ars Poetica 00
 Homo ex Humo 00
 Malignant00
 Trespass 00
 Orpheus at the Threshold 00
 Self-Portrait as Fucked-Up Mess 00
 Self-Portrait as Seventies Teen 00
 Riding the Bull 00
 The Wealth of Nations 00
 At the Grand Bazaar 00
 Civilization and Its Discontents 00
 Secret Combinations00
 A Valentine 00
 Called Back 00
 Rosetta Stone 00
 Two
 The Day After 00
 A Prayer 00
 On Broadway 00
 Dining Out after the Attack 00
 Holy Law 00
 Ready-Mades 00
 Terrorism00
 Of Thee I Sing 00
 Contemplating Disaster with the TV Off 00
 Sitting Still 00
 An Inferno 00
 Vita Breva 00
 Tenderness in a Dark Age 00
 For the New Year 00
 Beauty 00
 Elegy for Oum Kolsoum Written Across the Sky 00
 Kamikaze Pilots in Paradise 00
 Three
 The Book of Abraham00
 The Model 00
 Anniversary 00On Hearing the Seven Last Words of Christ 00
 Dau Al Set 00
 Mayakovsky's Scream 00
 Manifest Destiny 00
 What Remains 00
 Overcast 00
 Pedophilic Ode 00
 Cemetery 00
 Fault Line 00
 Something Coming 00
 Disgrace 00
 Beseiged by Roses Shot from Quivers 00
 A Raid for the Bridal 00
 Ekphrasis in Excelsis Deo 00
 Holding Pattern 00