Timothy Liu

cantfindit

Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) was born in 1965 in San Jose, California to immigrant parents from Mainland China. He is the author of twelve books of poems, including Of Thee I Sing, selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; Say Goodnight, a 1998 PEN Open Book Margins Award; and Vox Angelica, which won the 1992 Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. He has also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. Translated into ten languages, Liu’s poems have appeared in such places as Best American Poetry, Bomb, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. He is currently a Professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Liu is an intuitive reader of occult esoterica, including the Tarot and the I-Ching. Source

Sunday

And when they sat down in the morning

to bowls of cold cereal, each in turn

would notice the blades of a ceiling fan

spinning at the bottom of their spoons,

small enough to swallow, yet no one

ever mentioned it, neither looking up

nor into each other's eyes for fear

of feeding the hunger that held them there.

Published:

1995

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2025

Themes:

Doubt & Fear

Food

LGBTQ+ Experience

Poems of the Everyday

Literary Devices:

Alliteration

the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words appearing in succession

Imagery

visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work

Media Res

a literary work that begins in the middle of the action (from the Latin “into the middle of things)