Vox Angelica
Timothy Liu
1992 Norma Farber First Book Award
"These poems do sing: they are candid,
grateful for experience itself, and taken up from a mysterious depth." "In Liu’s text the ascent, the ecstatic apprehension of
the divine (he is a religious poet, there are no two ways about it, though perhaps there
are twenty) can be effected only by a demonic insistence upon abjection, upon the descent.
He shrives himself, and his poems show the marks of the lash—they are the
lash—and his vision is naturalized to a degree that would astonish his predecessors,
that astonishes us. This is a shocking poetry, and the shock is not of recognition, but of
estrangement. It makes an unfamiliar claim upon us, the claim of apostasy."
—Jean Valentine
—Richard Howard, from the forward
about the author
Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) was born and raised in San
Jose, California, by immigrant parents from mainland China. Liu has also resided in Hong
Kong, Utah, and Texas, living a life full of contradiction and beauty. Timothy Liu is the author of four books of poems: Vox Angelica (1992--winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America), Burnt Offerings (Copper Canyon Press, 1995), Say Goodnight (Copper Canyon Press, 1998) and Hard Evidence (Talisman House, 2001). He is also the editor of Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry(Talisman House, 2000). An Assitant Professor at William Paterson University, Liu makes his home in Hoboken, NJ.
