The Plight of Asian American Poetry

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*sigh*

A Review of Timothy Liu's For Dust Thou Art

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Here is Timothy Liu, author of various poetry collections including:
Say Goodnight
Vox Angelica
Burnt Offerings
Of Thee I Sing


Timothy Liu’s For Dust Thou Art is a fierce book that reminds me of Barbara Jane Reyes’s Poeta en San Francisco for its employment of religion as a way by which to reconsider prayers to some sort of god, whether it be Greek, Christian, or Muslim in origin in vain hope for progressive change. The collection is broken up into three sections. The first section concentrates most on sexuality without contextualization, an unmitigated hedonistic copulation in pax romana. That is, the various subjects spoken about seem to drift about without full understanding of the weight of world events unfolding even as they engage a variety of sexual acts with aplomb. Section two concentrates most specifically on 9/11 and the falling of the twin towers. It is here where it becomes clear the stakes in the collection: how does one conceptualize pleasure/beauty/aesthetics in any form in relation to this event? Liu is not content to merely suggest the solipsism inherent in American lifestyle in that moment but does consider this “event” as indicative of one of a merely long line of repetitive “forgettings.” Given Liu’s obvious queer grounding for this work, one immediately thinks of the title, “For Dust Thou Art” as linking the mortality of queer men in the face of the AIDS crisis to the mortality of the nation as embodied by the attacks made directly on U.S. soil, destroying any isolationist and idealistic conception of home. It is here that the collection seeks most to critique United States exceptionalism even as the various poems do speak of tragically configured individual losses: a fireman’s body part or an inability to reach a loved one. How does one look beyond oneself without immediately resorting to ostracization the various poems do seem to consider? The final section gives us the sense of bleak afterward where melancholia catalyzes continued violence: “There is a hunger/ Beyond all feeding,/ a mouth that will/ suck the marrow/ out of our bones – (57). One immediately recalls Freud’s conceptualization of melancholia through the process of an ambivalent enjoyment where consumption occurs in order to satiate that which has been lost. Here, the speaker of the poem “Cemetery” does not grant an end site to this hunger, because it is “beyond” physicality, existing in a psyche where death cannot or does not eliminate need and desire. Such a reading might seem pretty traditional were it not for Liu’s consistent pairing of 9/11 with queer sexuality, a seemingly dichotomous union, except for the fact that it shows to what extent the nation is willing to collectively embrace itself in order to position an Other into existence. Jasbir Puar and Amit S. Rai make this connection clear in their recent critical work that links the model minority in the post-9/11 age as one uniting the terrorist with the fag.