COMRADE by Daniel Liu

A poetry chapbook tracing a queer personal history and interrogating a relationship between a father and his son as immigrants in a new country.

Daniel Liu is an American poet and essayist from Central Florida. He is the recipient of awards from YoungArts, the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, the Pulitzer Center, Bennington College, and others, with work appearing in Diode, Kissing Dynamite, National Poetry Quarterly, Sepia Journal, Hobart After Dark, and elsewhere. He was a double-finalist for the Adroit Prize in both poetry and prose. The Editor-in-Chief of INKSOUNDS, Daniel serves on the editorial staff for The Augment Review, Indigo Literary Magazine, and The Lumiere Review.

“From start to finish, the verve and spirit behind the longing of each piece makes this collection of poems a living, breathing experience in desire. Liu’s is at its core an integral exploration of the forces of love and family. Every stanza, every enjambment, every word and white space, comes together to help us appreciate the beauty of his devotion to craft.”—Amy Wang, author of Mother— —Tongue (Ghost City Press)

“Peripeteia—a sudden reversal of fortune. Daniel Liu’s COMRADE explores an intimate space upturned by violence, spaces where ‘love [is] as fresh as / the slaughterhouse,’ where ‘a family heirloom [is] so full of graves,’ where ‘scar tissue / transform[s] into growl.’ Peripeteias braid themselves into each poem, yet Liu reaches further into the quietude of winter and radio silences, until his words become ingrained in your conscience, until they seep into your skin. In this experimental and startling collection, a revolution is brewing.”—Jessica Kim, author of L(EYE)GHT (Animal Heart Press)

"COMRADE—every word is precious. Liu compares men with gods and then dismantles that persona, speaks of how being a son is to be gentle within harshness, of remembrance within emptiness. The way a shadow is trapped beneath husk, an ending is just the twitch of a lip, the wishes you made floating down in the wind; through images like “I only wanted the light & / the light is only as close as you let it,” Liu reveals himself as a master of wordplay and syntax, deftly displaying his understanding of the pauses in emotion. An insightful, brilliant debut chapbook!"—Dhwanee Goyal, author of Kasauli Daydreams (Ghost City Press)

“From the very beginning of COMRADE, commencement poem “Headwaters” serves as a flesh-ridden quicksand, infinite, ancient, and visceral already in its epic declaration of the self. Here, the reader is immediately sucked into the wetness, the sloshing and thickness of unwitting muck, dirt, and earth, the blood and mud of physical being, the grotesque strain of simultaneously pushing and pulling against oneself... 

Essentially, the all-prevailing determination and resistance to become.

Visionary Daniel Liu's COMRADE is a guttural experience: an achievement in parallelism free of grueling redundancy. Not only does Liu's new collection reject allegiance to the western literary canon as we know it thus far; it also 1) effortlessly displays various experiments in visual and poetic technique, and 2) immaculately utilizes the art of entanglement, mastering time and space as they occur within these brilliant pages. Each poem in COMRADE exists as its own entity, manifesting both within and despite itself, and coming full circle as essential aspects of the larger collection. Throughout, the reader is transformed into an obsessive and desperate outpouring, already made ravenous by the expanse of Liu's written word."—Ami J. Sanghvi, Co-Founder of Gutslut Press, Author of Into Oblivion (Sweat-Drenched Press '22) and x( )-id</3 (Trickhouse Press '22)