“These poems, like the Tarot pack, range across the world, revealing lives and truths that are sometimes hidden, sometimes raw, sometimes strange and wonderful. As in the cards, as in life, there is pain and mystery, the sadness and beauty of desire, the holiness and splendor of rats, like God, hidden in the subway tunnels of our dreams.”
—Rachel Pollack, author of Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot
“Timothy Liu is a poet faithful to forms of unruliness; devoted to the unembellished and unabashed. Equally committed to a poetic craft that is capable of rearranging reality from the chaos of desire and its surplus of frustration, in his work to date—now organized into major and minor arcana culled from personal archives of encounter and memory, and from an alertness to world politics and history—he has mastered various kinds of forms into works that are unmistakably his own…. Inscribing the illusions and disappointment of personality with human relations as subjected to the dramaturgy of sex and desire, Liu commands that we care insomuch as outrageousness and generosity are finally devotion to “The things loved least / loved at last.”
—Roberto Tejada from the “Foreword”