An interview with T. Liem, author of Slows: Twice
In 1982, Singapore reinvented New Year’s Eve. As the clock crept forward around the rest of the world, slowly approaching midnight in a blur of fireworks and champagne flutes, the island in South East Asia—no less celebratory, was soberly engaged in the patriotic mission of adjusting its time zone. But where the rest of the world eagerly counted down to midnight, Singapore celebrated New Year’s Eve at 11:30 p.m. and then wound their clocks forward thirty minutes ahead. The island switched from Singapore Mean Time to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the centre of world time and the basis for the global system of time zones. This patriotic display of synchronization—almost impossible to imagine today—stems from globalization and the rule of capitalism. When the British colonized present-day Malaysia and Singapore in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the empire established time zones upon local municipalities to suit their needs for governance, trade, and communication. In 1981, Malaysia’s Prime Minister announced plans to align West Malaysia’s time with East Malaysia, which was 30 minutes ahead. Singapore quickly followed suit. In the blink of an eye, half an hour disappeared, but at what cost?
Singapore’s sudden shift in time holds personal, historical, and philosophical significance in T. Liem’s new poetry collection Slows: Twice. Shortlisted for the 2023 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and Longlisted for the 2024 Raymond Souster Award, the poems delve into the complex and often turbulent relationship between identity and time, posing profound questions about how we navigate the world. The collection is divided into two halves, with each poem mirroring another. Soft, luminous poems peel back the layers of our quotidian experience, combing through each second, minute and hour for a lost sense of familiarity. If world time zones are based on political and economic factors rather than purely geographical ones, then who we are, where we are born, and even the colour of our skin shape how we experience the world. It follows that Liem explores how the burdens of capitalism fragment our sense of self and our connections to others. But rather than getting bogged down in the past, Liem proposes new alternatives through the disruptive potential of language: “in the negative space / the past becomes an exercise where I draw / the reflection imperfected.” Radical, thoughtful, and challenging, Liem’s striking prose and concretism open doors in the reader’s mind. If time—an abstract yet governing philosophical principle can change simply at one’s whim—what else can change? Is what we experience real or an illusion of choice? Liem invites readers to consider the spaces of in-betweenness that redefine our relationships with time, identity, and each other: “Truth is dancing along with the faith we will find it.”
Liem is a poet and writer from Vegreville, Alberta, and currently resides in Montreal, Quebec. Liem is the author of Obits (2018), which won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award in 2019. Their work has appeared in The Boston Review, PRISM, Catapult, The Ampersand Review, The Malahat Review, Best Canadian Poetry 2018 and 2019, and elsewhere.
Matthew Hanick spoke with Liem about their writing and editing process, identity, time, capitalism, and more.
MH: How did you discover poetry?
TL: In a not very exciting way–school. I don’t think the kind of poetry I read in elementary or secondary school really sparked anything. I don’t think I started reading poetry that moved or energized me in a way that I wanted to write well into my twenties, when I was in university and around other people who were doing it and excited about sharing their work with me. It arrived to me the same way music can arrive for people, in a social way. In some ways, it feels like a late arrival to poetry, but being in your twenties, you’re still young, so it’s not so late.
MH: How would you describe your second full-length collection, Slows: Twice?
TL: Every time I talk about this book, I start by saying that it’s about identity, the words one uses to describe their identity, and how those words shift over time. That always leads me to wanting to extend the summary and say it’s also very much about time. I did a lot of research on time perception. There are small moments, like the concrete-picture poems at the beginning and end, that refer to the document that established time zones in Singapore around 1900. So I hope that some of the scenes dealing with that—and with work, and our relationship to our identity through work, and how we experience time—come through as well. But every time I try to talk about this book, it feels like it’s about everything, for me.
MH: Did writing this collection alter how you interpret or manage your time, day-to-day?
TL: I don’t know if they’ve changed my day-to-day. One of the books about time perception I read said that there are some people who visualize time in a very specific way. If you ask someone to draw the year, some people will have a very specific idea. It will be like a circle or a plain or a shape, and all of the months will have different sizes and things like that. Which is just the reminder that everyone’s experience of reality is different. That was really interesting. One of the more anecdotal things that was interesting was about circadian rhythms. There was someone—whose name I totally forget—who did an experiment where he lived underground in an ice cave for I don’t know how many months, but in a place with no light. So, the rhythms that we have, which are tuned to light, were gone. I think his time shifted not so far off, but his sleep cycle changed overtime. I don’t know that it’s affected my own life except to remember that time is fake
MH: Time guides our lives, acting as a framework. What was it like to explore this relationship?
TL: Time is a colonial construct. The documents about the time zone in Singapore really made that concrete and practical because they literally just discussed what time it should be in Singapore. I didn’t know that’s what the time ball—you know, the ball that drops on New Year’s Eve—is leftover from times when they had to coordinate ships and carts. I feel like these things are obvious, but time as a normal thing is so taken for granted, I never thought about how it was invented to coordinate the movement of goods, and thus labour, and thus all of these things. Remember when the boat got stuck in the Suez Canal? I was learning about all of this at the time. As soon as we started moving things around in trains and ships, we needed time to coordinate all of those efforts. That’s where all those practical consequences of time as a colonial construct really bear down on us.
MH: Our experience of time is highly politicized and dependent on factors such as ethnicity, race, sexuality, and disability. Was visiting/re-visiting this subject in any way difficult:
TL: Yeah, I think there are many reasons why, as a writer, there is pressure to be constantly productive and creating new things. It was difficult for me to give myself permission to revisit and write about previous topics without feeling that it was a waste of time. Another challenge relates to the intersections you mentioned, which ties into what I was discussing earlier—reflecting on how the words I use to identify myself have evolved over time. These words change based on context, the people using them, and their connotations and tone. What once felt accurate in terms of self-description and identification can later seem completely wrong. Confronting these changes and feeling embarrassed about past language use is tricky to navigate.
MH: The collection is divided in two so that the second half mirrors the first. Was this a linear writing process in which you finished poems and then revised them?
TL: The revision process emerged from being in a total rut. I had a group of poems that loosely connected and were forming a collection, but I wasn’t sure how they related to each other. I started rewriting them backwards, which turned out to be very productive. Initially, I followed a strict process of writing each poem backwards—line by line, word by word—to see if any new language emerged. This exercise served as a prompt for re-writing the existing poems and exploring new possibilities. Although I didn’t stick rigidly to the process, it became interesting to see how taking vocabulary from one poem and placing it into a different context could yield new results. It wasn’t a linear process. For instance, I had a poem I struggled with, and writing it backwards led to a result that I liked, combining both versions in a way that felt effective.
In a prior interview with The Malahat Review, you mentioned that your best attribute as a poet is ‘restraint.’ How did you, or did you, exercise restraint while writing and then re-writing a poem?
TL: I really like editing my work. I feel like that’s sort of common. A blank page is really hard; if I can fill a page and then cut things away, for me, that’s the most fruitful part of writing. It is a little bit of a process of letting go. It’s also not letting go though because the things that I’m cutting away I’m putting into a document that I have called “Good Line Graveyard”—like, that’s a nice line, it doesn’t belong here, but I don’t have to let go in the sense that, alas, no one will read it ever. I can look at it later and see if it fits somewhere else or holds up. I think and hope I’m not overly precious with my own work. I am precious about it but I also really love feedback, and when someone’s willing to say this line isn’t working, I’m so happy to get it out of there.
MH: Your first collection, Obits, is also an exercise in revision, interpreting death, loss, and cultural absence through language. How does Slows: Twice continue themes of lost cultural heritage in your prior work?
TL: There is a moment in Obits that points to this collection, Slows. I think it’s the very last poem, where the speaker is on the metro again, looking at their reflection. That’s another way I view this book—as a reflection, in the broadest sense and hopefully in the literal sense of the way the poems appear from beginning to end. For me, there’s a continuation in terms of returning to our perceptions, and my personal investment lies in contemplating what has changed over a couple of generations in my family. The generations in my family are quite distant. My paternal grandmother was born in 1905, and I was born in 1985, so she was 80 when I was born. The changes that occurred in that century were monumental, not just for everyone, but when I reflect on it, it’s like… My dad grew up in Indonesia and experienced Japanese occupation, which led to frequent relocations. Decades later, here I am, sitting on my couch, able to order a pizza with ease. It’s fascinating to consider how close yet distant those generations are, both personally and historically. I’m not sure if this theme carries through from Obits. Obits engages a lot with family history, and Slows continues that exploration but within a different timeframe—focusing less on death and more on the passage of time and a whole century of changes.
MH: How do you decide if a moment is worth revisiting?
TL: A lot of my decisions come from the other work that I’m reading. Advice that has been really helpful is to lean into your obsessions and the things you notice in your writing. I love and hate going to the grocery store. There’s something so intriguing about visiting a new grocery store, not knowing where anything is, but it can also be very stressful. This might have come from a diary entry or from when I made it a habit to write a few lines every day. Noticing recurring elements like this is part of the process of seeing what’s there and connecting them to what could be. Taking the advice to heart, I believe that my interests and obsessions are worth writing about. I hope that’s true for others too. If you’re interested in something, there’s a reason, and it’s up to you to figure out what that is. If you’re interested, you can make it interesting. I would read a poem—just looking around my desk—a poem about post-it notes if someone had something interesting to say. I think it’s possible. The scenes might not always be super conscious decisions—they are and they aren’t. There’s the matter of constructing a book, writing and rewriting, and realizing, “Well, I’ve got two grocery store poems.”
MH: What advice do you have for poets, writers, and creatives whose experience writing manifests slowly:
TL: There’s no rush. That’s obviously an attitude which is much easier to advocate than to experience. Of course, the goal of publishing is to have concrete, tangible validation of one’s work, and I think that’s important. But I also believe there’s a lot of value in allowing yourself to think about something for a long time. When writing this book, the theme of slowness and letting things stew over became significant. The changes that happen and the way I think about things can evolve in ways that sometimes feel embarrassing. It’s interesting, though, as you grow and learn to confront and embrace all those different versions of yourself. Observing what happens in the world, taking heart, and continuing to write is important. There’s time. Life is long, maybe too long
MH: Are you working on anything new at the moment?
TL: I’m trying to work on a novel, although I don’t want to say it out loud. I think I will still write some poems, but my focus is shifting to fiction. I’m experimenting to see what I can do. There’s a chance I might fail or that it might not work out at all. Regardless, I’ll continue writing poems, but right now, this is what I’m working on.
This is a corrected version of the interview published in print in White Wall Review issue 52.