T. Liem was born and raised in Vegreville, Alberta and now lives in Montreal, Quebec. Liem’s heritage is Indonesian and British. Their autobiographical essay “Rice Cracker” (Malahat Review, Issue 193, Dec. 2015) won the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize in 2015.
Poetry
Obits.
Toronto: Coach House Books, 2018.
PS8623.I363 O25 2018
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Can poems mourn the unmourned? In Obits. a speaker tries and fails to write obituaries for those whose memorials are missing, those who are represented only as statistics. She considers victims of mass deaths, fictional characters, and her own aunt, asking what does it mean to be an ‘I’ mourning a ‘you’ when both have been othered? Centring vulnerability, the various answers to this question pass through trauma, depression, and the experience of being a mixed-race queer woman.
Awards and Honours
2019 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (League of Canadian Poets)(Winner)
2019 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry (Quebec Writers’ Federation)(Winner)
2019 Lambda Literary Award–Poetry, Lesbian Poetry (Finalist)
Poetry
Slows: Twice
Toronto: Coach House Press, 2023.
e-book (Access restricted to members of the university community)
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
This is a book of slow hours, days, and years – how they can collapse into one another, how it can feel like we are living one day repeating itself. From within this collapse, the speaker seeks connection everywhere. They visit their father’s birthplace, Jogjakarta; they listen to a stranger’s phone call at the Motel 6 in Alberta; they linger in the so-called ethnic aisle of the grocery store. From all of these places the speaker is discouraged but tries to imagine a future joyously incomprehensible to the present.
Slows: Twice is a collection of revisions and repetitions; every poem in one half of the book has an alternate version, or a mirror poem, in the other half. The poems are tied to themes of work and labour, consumption and waste, family and home, as shapers of identity and relationships. The act of revising and repeating – slowly – is meant to be a resistance to efficiency, a resistance to being an always-productive body under capitalism.
Awards and Honours
2023 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry–Quebec Writers’ Federation Literary Awards (Finalist)
Links
Publisher Coach House Books