SLOWS: TWICE by T. Liem

Backward and forward: a double book of mirrored poems about identity in all its forms.

This is a book of slow hours, days, and years - how they can collapse into one another, how it can feel like we are living one day repeating itself. From within this collapse, the speaker seeks connection everywhere. They visit their father's birthplace, Jogjakarta; they listen to a stranger's phone call at the Motel 6 in Alberta; they linger in the so-called ethnic aisle of the grocery store. From all of these places the speaker is discouraged but tries to imagine a future joyously incomprehensible to the present.

Slows: Twiceis a collection of revisions and repetitions; every poem in one half of the book has an alternate version, or a mirror poem, in the other half. The poems are tied to themes of work and labour, consumption and waste, family and home, as shapers of identity and relationships. The act of revising and repeating - slowly - is meant to be a resistance to efficiency, a resistance to being an always-productive body under capitalism.