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    Don't Go Back to Sleep
    Don't Go Back to Sleep
    Don't Go Back to Sleep
    Ebook97 pages48 minutes

    Don't Go Back to Sleep

    By Timothy Liu

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    About this ebook

    Don’t Go Back To Sleep answers the Sufi call to wake up to this life in the here and now where ecstasy serves its summons, inviting us to break out of the mundane quotidian. Timothy Liu winds the clock back to the Nanking Massacre in 1937, then traces its consequences on his family of origin, his mother’s mental illness, his father’s religious fundamentalism, and Liu’s obsessive search for love. As trauma begets trauma the poems slowly accrete, and Liu takes on a legacy of poetic witness where carnal violence ultimately turns to spiritual joy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSaturnalia Books
    Release dateOct 1, 2014
    ISBN9780991545421
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      Book preview

      Don't Go Back to Sleep - Timothy Liu

      DON’T GO BACK TO SLEEP

      Timothy Liu

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      My thanks to the editors of Asian-American Literary Review, The Bakery, Clade Song, Cobalt Review, Conversations Across Borders, Denver Quarterly, Four Way Review, Interim, Kenyon Review, Mandorla, The Margins, New South, Ocean State Review, Plume, The Progressive, Poetry Daily, Rattle, Seneca Review, Smartish Pace, Swink, They Will Sew the Blue Sail, Two Countries, Virginia Quarterly Review, Water-Stone Review, Witness, Yale Review and Zocalo Square for publishing these poems.

      The Lovers, Unsleeping, 4:01 A.M., Unsleeping, 5:18 A.M., Unsleeping, 5:36 A.M., and Without You first appeared in The Thames & Hudson Project (Fields Press, 2011) by Hansa Bergwall & Timothy Liu.

      The Remains, The Silence and Classical Musical will appear in Two Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents.

      The Decision was reprinted in Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses (Pushcart Press, 2011).

      My thanks also to Bruce Beasley, Roberto Tejada, Henry Israeli, Jimmie Cumbie, Katie Rauk and Mason Gates for their close readings in the making of this book.

      All the love in the world to my husband Chris and to my beloved Hansa.

      Cover art and inserts by Christopher Arabadjis.

      This book is for my Tyger. Yld4e.

      CONTENTS

      A Requiem for the Homeless Spirits

      *

      Building Trust

      The Decision

      I Know My Husband’s Body

      The Assignation

      Romance

      Dream Fragment on the Eve of My Beloved’s Wedding

      Without You

      The Ring

      I Know Your Mouth Better

      A Lover Doesn’t Have To

      If Everything I Said

      Romance

      The Gift

      A Bed of Ash

      The Gift

      Romance

      The Crisis

      Romance

      The Lovers

      *

      First Memory

      Classical Music

      Another Anxiety Attack

      The Silence

      Deep Song

      Anonymous

      Here

      *

      Unsleeping, 3:25 A.M.

      Romance

      Without Asking

      Unsleeping, 4:01 A.M.

      The Crushing Din

      The Windows

      All Trains Are Going Local

      Easy Does It

      This Too Shall Pass

      The Garden of Earthly Delights

      The Assignation

      The Betrothal

      Romance

      Summertime

      The Bridegroom

      Unsleeping, 5:18 A.M.

      Sine Qua Non

      The Lovers

      Unsleeping, 5:36 A.M.

      *

      The Remains

      The love I talk of is not in the books. —Kabir

      A REQUIEM FOR THE HOMELESS SPIRITS

      There is no language to adequately describe the Japanese crimes.

      —Ma Xiuyi, Survivor

      Head of a Chinese soldier with a cigarette butt in its mouth

      (taken by whom?) (given by whom?)

      who never got to see the image he’d become

      in the papers, in textbooks, online—

      an image that has outlasted whatever grave

      he did or did not get to have

      in this life—

      This is not how anyone would want to be remembered—

      future generations thumbing through the pages, the

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