T. Liem, SLOWS : TWICE

 

The second collection from Montreal-based poet T. Liem, following OBITS. (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2018), is SLOWS : TWICE (Coach House Books, 2023), a collection of mirror-texts, with each poem corresponding to a counterpoint poem at the other end of the collection, until each end of the collection finally meets, or even collides, in the middle. Through each pairing there’s an abstract of questions and how answers reveal themselves. Liem works through erasure, revision, reclamation, translation and transmogrification, exploring how stories are solved, resolved, morphed and recovered. “We need concepts more / than they need us so try again without me,” Liem writes, as part of “1985 –,” “and the grandmother. It’s been done.” And, as the corresponding poem, “– YYYY,” offers, simultaneously:

My liver my take So
done been it’s. grandmother the and
me without again try so us need they than:
more concepts need

Liem writes amid and between categories of self and identity, offering each poem facing its mirror, composing both staring at and through the other, whether as a pair of straight, clean images or as two that blend and shimmer into the other. “language is change / changed by prosody,” Liem writes, as part of “THE SECOND HALF / FOLDS IN ON ITSELF,” “later an offer / a translation [.]” Liem writes of existing in that in-between of being, as the back cover offers, “divided in half, a charged division for someone who is often identified as such ethnically and racially. As each half unfolds, divisions of category blur – work and pleasure, night and day, home and stranger are reinvented.” “Maybe / one of two.” the poem “THE PAST” offers; further on, writing “Maybe / both.” A bit deeper into the same piece, a futher fragment reads: “lexicon of what I had been called / coincides with / lexicon of what I calls self [.]”