For Dust Thou Art

Timothy Liu, an associate professor of English at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., has published poems in numerous journals and is the author of five previous collections of poetry. Of Thee I Sing was selected as a 2004 Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and a cowinner of the Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series Competition. Vox Angelica received the 1992 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Liu is also the editor of Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. His papers and journals are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

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 in poetry itself: uncontrollable melancholy and music. - David Shapiro, author of A Burning Interior and Mondrian: Flowers ""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 Patrnos. 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