Let It Ride

by Timothy Liu

At the height of his powers, Timothy Liu’s first book since his New & Selected Poems explores how the necessities of life and art dovetail to open up a vital path forward at midlife. His twelfth book of poems, Let It Ride  integrates life’s struggles at midlife by way of disintegration. What’s left behind are lyrical traces, poetry a gambol, love a gamble, you’re either all in or all out. You let it ride, that is, if you’ve got the guts. And ride he does. These poems argue for a life that is more than amusement—rather, a mythic venture waiting to be embodied, embarked upon. And invariably, it almost never turns out well, not in the long run. But Let It Ride show us that, sometimes, if you happen to get lucky, if you have the good fortune to jot a few things down—you just might stand a chance to walk away from the crowded table with shreds of your soul intact.

Genres: Poetry

110 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2019

Reviews

[Matt McBride · Rating 5 out of 5]

Populated by Dizzy Gillespie, Hieronymus Bosch, and the headless torso on Grindr 80 feet away, these are poems that are constantly moving. Liu ends one poem by expanding infinitely outward: "Chuck Berry, Beethoven/ and Willie aboard the Voyager/ sailing through outer space" only to close the next "on shore/ in the corners of our eyes." It's about the two men in a steam room and "the business/ at hand to to be found/ in any book of verse" as well as "where the void awaits" in the speaker's life as rides into the fifth decade of his life. Lyric, inventive, and saturated in all the fluids of the body, Let It Ride becomes a kind of anthem in a world spinning so rapidly it's centrifugal forces throw us further and further from our stationary center.