Customer Reviews

Say Goodnight

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The poems in Say Goodnight are clear, brave, and true. They affect the reader like ice falling from a great height, leaving one startled with the force of its brutality and beauty. Timothy Liu is one of our best poets, and with this book, one does not want to say goodnight at all.

In his book "Say Goodnight," poet Timothy Liu writes "What is touched by loss / is sometimes made more sacred" (from the poem "That Summer"). Liu is adept at finding the intersection of the sacred, the political, and the sexual, and this 100-page collection of poems is a remarkable exercise of his voice.

Many of the poems in this book deal with death or other types of loss. He often uses religious imagery and allusions, and much of the book deals with gay male sexuality. There is a strong political flavor to much of this book, more so than in his collection "Burnt Offerings."

Some of the poems that made the biggest impact on me are as follows:

"The Prodigal Son Writes Home," a very in-your-face poem that marries graphic gay sex to religious imagery; "Power," a meditation on society's fixation with the male sexual organ (it opens "Half the penis remains / from a man whose dong had been bitten off / by a dog"); "Billions Served," a grisly poem about the inhumanity of the meat industry; "Oasis," an ironic poem that takes place at the Walt Whitman Service Area, "off the Jersey Pike" (Whitman is also invoked in Liu's collection "Burnt Offerings"); "The Rand MaNally Road Atlas," a humorous haiku with a homoerotic theme; "The Presence of Absence in a Midwest Town," about hate crime and censorship in America; and "Against Nature," a disturbing reflection on scientific inquiry into homosexuality.

Throughout the book Liu demonstrates his keen eye for sensory detail: he notices "dry kelp flaking off our soles like bits / of burnt confetti" (from "North Truro"), or the way "pigeons crown a stone Madonna smeared / with excrement" (from the multipart poem "A Baedeker"). For me, "Say Goodnight" confirms Liu's stature as an amazing contemporary poet.