I Want to Live Here / Where Nothing Coheres
which might incite a utopia in which I will not remember I wasn't awake in my life. Blood circulated but I was still amplifying softness to mimic intimacies. Everything soundedlike a shore at night. A threshold between me and potential in any direction. Spooked, I revealed myself in every mirror. I looked down though the moon appeared to float. I was a yes man and grabbed whole what was in my reach. I was outside myself and under tow. The opposite of eternitydressed me. It is why I was comfortable alone, but was I ever really a swimmer. In my chosen height I was a head above thought. I was energized by adulthood but didn't ask what kind of water is this.
Feature Date
- October 8, 2023
Series
- Editor's Choice
Selected By
- Brian Teare
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“I Want to Live Here / Where Nothing Coheres” from SLOWS: TWICE: by t. liem.
Published by Coach House Books in May 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by t. liem.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Surah Field-Green
t. liem is the author of Obits. (Coach House, 2018), which was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award, and won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award as well as the the A. M. Klein Prize. Their writing has been published in Apogee, Plenitude, The Boston Review, Grain, Maisonneuve, Catapult, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. Their essay about family and growing up with Indonesian and British heritages, ‘Rice Cracker,’ won the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize in 2015. They are from Alberta and live in Montreal, Tio’Tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territories.
"The poems of Slows: Twice collect in resonance, contemplate the construction of selves, with modes of repetition, sequencing, and mirroring, the way language assembles an identity or points to itself as it points away. 'The clouds // disappear the sky sometimes; or they become it.' Storied and cubistic, palindromic and cleaved, Liem’s poems reveal relationships to time, noise, and duration, and the possibility of joy given painful pasts."
—Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
"T. Liem is one of my favorite poets working in Canada. I welcomed this book into my life like sudden sunlight. Slows: Twice is a book about how urgently we need to read differently. I loved its mischievous relation to form and expectation as well as its burning intelligence. I once described T. as an inheritor of the tradition of language poetry, but what Slows: Twice proves is that T. is less an inheritor and more so an innovator, an inventor in their own right. I read it in one frenzied sitting."
—Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A Minor Chorus
"It’s breathtaking to watch words drip from a page into a silver river cutting through a canyon of time. T. Liem sculpts poetry with steady, curious fingers, pushing against the filaments we think hold us together that have been quietly collecting cracks, from buried violence and whispered histories to the fragile connections tying us together. Obits. captured my heart; Slows: Twice now affirms it."
—Teta, founder of diasporic Indonesian publication Buah zine
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