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Slows: Twice
Paperback
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ISBN13: 9781552454619
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: May 9 2023
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.35
Height: 0.40 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.40
Language: English
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 A.M. KLEIN PRIZE FOR POETRY
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD
CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN SPRING 2023
Backward and forward: a double book of mirrored poems about identity in all its forms.
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
'For everything I was, I am now something else.' Revision of self and world are core to this innovative, unruly book that manages somehow to be at once formally wacky and emotionally clear. These poems seem to ask: if language is a box heavy with histories and inadequacies and which we nevertheless must carry, can language also carry us somewhere, elsewhere, strangely? Rarely have I encountered a book so at home in the unresolved, in the tension between a longing for declaration and a commitment to questions. T. Liem's work conjures the figure of Janus: god of duality and gates, one face facing an end, the other looking through a new door, right in the eye of a dream. - Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
T. Liem's Slows: Twice is a fascinating exercise in revision and remaking, each repetition of its text accomplishing the arduous task of stretching time and geopolitical fixity. 'asking and repeating/ we are made' declares Liem, and that utterance produces the book's essential maxim, 'language is change/ changed by prosody.' In between these cracks of time, language becomes a miracle suture for love and connection where the hard reality of one's circumstances may produce infinite ruptures. This is a book that peers into the fissure, holding these moments of fracture as still and clearly as possible--a future of proximates. - Muriel Leung, author of Imagine Us, the Swarm
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