Specimen: An Essay

by Sienna Liu

Contaminated by literature and compelled by the impossibility of translating one another, two young lovers fall in love against their better judgment in Sienna Liu’s polyvocal book-length essay Specimen.

Through meetings and missives from Cape Town to Beijing to Paris to London, the lovers lie, fight, observe and analyze, write and re-write themselves for one another, only to find that their carefully constructed narrative has obtained a life of its own which overshadows and usurps their relationship. Weaving together years of diaries, notes, text messages, and memory, Specimen is an exploration of diaspora, nostalgia, writing, the creation of oneself through another, and time itself.

90 pages, Paperback

Published July 15, 2025

Reviews

[Rebecca Gransden]

Sienna Liu’s Specimen seeks to articulate the ineffable facets of desire. A fragmentary and lyrical hindsight finds lovers in an entanglement as fragile as it is seemingly unwise. Not only an interrogation of memoir, of the compulsion to write other people onto the page, but a probing commentary on the price and rewards of setting out on such a task. When we look back, what do we ask of those who reach out in memory?

Read my interview with the author at XRAY Literary Magazine.

[Reisse Myy Fredericks · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are compelling ideas here—particularly around how translation distorts meaning in relationships—but I struggled to connect with this project. The narrator’s distracting fixation on a man who fetishizes suffering as moral enlightenment overshadowed her poetic aims, and Liu’s writing, though elegant, seemed continuously misdirected toward someone undeserving. Ultimately, I found it more sad than stirring.

[Split Lip Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Koi t-shirtsy, poetry-swooned, meta-anecdotal over a lover named E, Sienna Liu’s 'four-dimensional rose' Specimen is a blend of atmospheric nostalgia and bilingual love." —Vi Khi Nao

Contaminated by literature and compelled by the impossibility of translating one another, two young lovers fall in love against their better judgment in Sienna Liu’s polyvocal book-length essay Specimen.

Through meetings and missives from Cape Town to Beijing to Paris to London, the lovers lie, fight, observe and analyze, write and re-write themselves for one another, only to find that their carefully constructed narrative has obtained a life of its own which overshadows and usurps their relationship. Weaving together years of diaries, notes, text messages, and memory, Specimen is an exploration of diaspora, nostalgia, writing, the creation of oneself through another, and time itself.

​Blurbed by Marie Darrieussecq, Maggie Olszewski, Simon Wu, Dylan Fisher, and Vi Khi Nao, quoted above!