Burnt Offerings Book

"...and I thought of our hands that labor / for beauty yet unknown to the world, / a calendar of empty hours / suddenly filled / with birds and fields of wildflowers, / an oversized violin left out in the sun."

Timothy Liu writes graceful poems about eros ' including topics such as the joy and alienation of queer sex, the drama of penis size, the doomed seeking of connection through glory holes in a basement bathroom stall ' with a voice that is controlled, rich, and imagistic. His poems do not have the quality of being too "worked." There is both a vulnerability and an intensity that roll off each line-break. I am fascinated by humanity in these poems, which present their subjects as they are, without so excessively manipulating the language as to render it no longer a thing of the body but a thing so abstract that it ceases to vibrate in the reader's bones. In fact, the poems here occasionally seem to actively resist a too-edited style; there is a conversational quality that is lyrical but refuses to be *too* lyrical. The speaker's voice welcomes us in as it then proceeds to estrange us with unexpected image progressions and turns of focus. The effect can be quite bewildering and wonderful.