Timothy Liu, Bending the Mind Around the Dream’s Blown Fuse
ISBN: 978-1-58498-065-0, paper, $13.95
Praise for Timothy Liu's earlier books:
“A three-time Lambda Award nominee, Liu still aims to shock, but those shocks are aggregated toward a greater cause, as his poetry presses for understandings based on the body and celebrates gay America from
backseat to shining sea. His poems meld a post-Miltonic high style to down-and-dirty reportage, mixing choppy and verbally challenging poems with more fluid, narrative affairs.” --Publishers Weekly
“Timothy Liu writes out of an angry materialism, ill-fitting body, disappointment at every turn. He takes on his point of view wholeheartedly and compresses the consequences into phrases that echo and mimic each other,
thereby increasing the sensation of claustrophobia and fever. Lots of humor erupts to keep the machine going. Is will the same as desire? It didn’t used to be, not now it is. His poetry is fully present to the time we are in.”
—Fanny Howe
“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. But the permanent, complicated delight is Liu’s poetry itself: uncontrollable melancholy and music.”
--David Shapiro
Timothy Liu is the author of six books of poems, including Of Thee I Sing (2004 Book-of-the-Year Award from Publishers Weekly) and Vox Angelica (1992 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America). His poems have been translated into nine languages, and his papers and journals are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. He lives in Manhattan