A Mirror to the Self and to Language: A Review of T. Liem’s Slows: Twice

In T. Liem’s Slows: Twice, language is perpetually malleable, possible to stretch infinitely. Slows: Twice engages with the possibilities of language in its attempts to understand the self — in relation to everything; the self, much like language, is stretched in every direction to be understood. In mirror poems Liem engages with how identity is made, unmade, understood, revealing the self slowly — first forwards, then backwards. Building and unbuilding, Liem, in these poems is deeply concerned with the making and unmaking of identity, and holds up a mirror to the self and to language.

In the opening poem of the collection, “I Want to Live Here Where Nothing Coheres”, Liem writes: “…a threshold / between me and potential in any direction.” (9) And further in the same poem, they continue: “I revealed myself / in every mirror.” (9) Here is what Liem seeks to do always in this collection — to hold the self up to the mirror always, creating a sense of almost and not-quite in relation to how the self is understood. In the same poem, Liem includes, following the prose, a collagistic image collection of news articles — here vertical, and at the end, or the other beginning of the collection, horizontal. These sections, parallel and perpendicular, create a sense of the familiar that is different, Liem’s goal throughout these poems — almost the same yet not quite. Liem always forces new ways of seeing, or perceiving and being perceived. Every poem is a threshold, creating new gateways to reading this work in new and inventive ways.

Time and the diasporic relationship to time form a central part of the self and the world Liem engages with in this collection. “Time You Can’t Argue With” explores this deeply, and is another example of their inventiveness with language — never held back by its limits, always boundless with its possibilities; both formally in the poem and structurally in the collection as a whole, the poem is visually compelling. Both the poem and the mirror poem are titled the same, and the one that comes first consists of four different permutations of the line “A date is a not common understanding of a common experience”, with the word “not” appearing in a different place in the sentence in each time it appears, creating the boundaries of a square visually. And the mirror poem is vastly different, though it similarly consists of one line: “Time lets you be in the world in so many ways: at 4:02 at 4:03 again again again” (67). This line appears on the middle of the page, appearing after the half mark between times listing every minute from 4:00 to 5:00, creating a break in time. Time is disrupted, visually on the page here; time is understood, complicated, un-understood, understood again.

Reminiscent of poets like Sally Wen Mao in its exploration of time, Slows: Twice is always challenging the form poetry can take, as we see here — the poems are vastly different, unlike other mirror poems in this collection that are similar in their language, their forms, but also share a title, again, unlike other mirror poems in this collection. And elsewhere, in “A Request”, Liem writes: “Time aside, the past toppled you unperfect is too close / to say it was. Or tomorrow was a lion’s mouth / you would step into.” (13) Here, Liem’s speaker engages with the relationship of time to the complicated nature of how time is understood narratively in terms of their relationships. Time is central to how this speaker understands and makes sense of the world, and is always ruptured, connected, fragmented, joined. Time, like language here, is malleable in the hands of this speaker, limitless in its generosity towards the self.

The central poem of the collection, “The Second Half Folds in On Itself” epitomizes the collection as a whole. In couplets, Liem builds and then immediately unravels, holding up the mirror immediately. Formally broken with white space, this poem explores what it means to understand and create a self in relation to language. Liem writes: “it is a learning process / to drape tenderness around our questions” (38). Here Liem articulates the central premise of the collection — to approach questions shaped by a tenderness to place, to language, to time, despite the fact that these are both the cause and solution to the fractures of their identity. They write: “allegiance to a place is / a mirror in which / you make eye contact / with a stranger” (39). Liem complicates the relationships of place and the self — here, the place of allegiance is both the self and the stranger, both known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar. Liem, further in the poem, says about the self in relation to language: “I was a living language” (43). And its mirror: “I was a language living” (48). Liem’s words here reflect the pliancy of language in their hands throughout this collection — the potentiality of it, its perpetual growth. Language is never limited — just as permeable across time as the self, always meeting the self with growth and warmth and change. Each line in this poem is similar to its mirror, creating an almost sense of déja vu before the realization that it is fundamentally different, altered by slightly different placement, phrasing, completely new.

Formally dazzling and lyrically inventive, Slows: Twice is an immensely moving collection of poems that will make you awestruck at its sheer brilliance with language and white space. Language and time both equally form the mirrors that allow this speaker to understand their self in the world. Using white space, the visual poem, and a generosity with language and with form, Slows: Twice makes you reconsider the familiar, and seek new ways to understand what was once known.