Every building in the city is held together with grout.
A forest is unified by an extended root system underground.
So, invisible lines are like the moments
between the pages when flipping drawings become animation.
Do events have to be part of a story.
How can two events be part of one story and also mean
two distinct stories. She’s disappointed.
brisk and probing and at times a little nerdy
Michael Earl Craig
In this collection of observational poems, Sandra considers the world around her, wherever she may be or between, and wherever her thoughts of her environment and her position in it take her. She uses language directly, sometimes broken, to reflect the inherent conflicts and harshness in nature, modernity, and man, but also their beauty and mysticism, and at times with a wry humour.
Sandra Liu’s work has been seen in The Atlantic, the Beloit Poetry Journal, 1913 a journal of forms, and elsewhere. Collaborative work has been presented at the Gwangju Biennale and Sikkema Jenkins. A first book is forthcoming in 2025 with Ugly Duckling Presse.
Liu’s deliberate, probing lines inhabit the slow, factual inevitability of the long march of geological time and human invention, but at the same time are electric and bursting with the energy of the particular, syntax and sounds colliding like atoms rubbing together to move massive plates of emotion and thought.
Gillian Olivia Blythe Hamel
The poetry of Sandra Liu is nervous and alive. Her voice has emerged, after long gestation, with an accent individual and disturbing. I am particularly moved by the immediacy of her meditations."
Harold Bloom
Sandra Liu has written a book that seems to compassionately address just about everything I think about these days: the end of the earth as we know it, the question of multiplicity, how much multiplicity we can handle in the noisy sad din of information we are subject to and subject of, the break down of textual language we utilize to cover this 'story.' As such she is one of the small group of writers and intellectuals absorbing, rather than refusing or representing, the rubble we inhabit as the material from which might emerge contemporary forms of poetic sense.
Rachel Levitsky
The poems in Sandra Liu’s On Poems On are brisk and probing and at times a little nerdy, which I love. The adjective linguistic comes to mind—or lexical, but never (not ever) wordy, do you follow? At first the dice start moving a little: 'he the pedogenesis.' Then they begin to spin, quickly but not recklessly: 'you can’t be blue/ unless you are a man/ who thinks he’s a berry.' Like a clerk in a produce section leaning over a misted bin of radishes, it is my job to direct you to this work.
Michael Earl Craig
Nils Karsten is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has been shown in galleries and museums throughout the US and internationally.
Perfect-bound. 28 pp, 5.25 x 7 in
Publication Date: August 01 2012