Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

the Crab Orchard Series
in Poetry
Series Editor, Jon Tribble
Copublished with Crab Orchard Review
2005 Editor’s Selection
For Dust
Thou Art
Poems by Timothy Liu
“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
“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
For Dust Thou Art
66 pages
ISBN 0-8093-2652-3, $14.95 paper
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