If “abstracting nature” is a bold aesthetic move for the modernist painter, reliance on her husband Steiglitz or patrons’ “financial support” permits survival in the face of such daring. In the comfort of a Lexington Avenue apartment with a good view, O’Keefe can further abstract the geometry of tall buildings, as well as nature. While the artist rejects masculinist Freudian readings of her work-most notably, the flower paintings-Liu playfully withholds information about whether she rejected Dole Pineapple’s offer, indicating that, in the culture at large, it signifies O’Keefe’s major reputation and makes light of the question of whether she compromised aesthetic standards for lucre or staunchly upheld her vision. The ironic juxtaposed mention of severe visual impairment and of the honor exemplary of “American icons” underscores the simultaneity of personal loss of power and burgeoning social power for the “idea” of this artist’s individual “vision.” The ambiguity of “scattering” (in dying or after cremation) permits the “stamp” of commodification to be achieved without the possible contradictions of the artist’s own perspective on her life and work.

     Three poems in Hard Evidence are long sequences. “To Calamus,” which spans 20 page-long sections, can be read as a millennial revision of Whitman’s Calamus poems, often cited as the bard’s most markedly homosexual work. Taken as a whole, Liu’s poem-which, in individual sections, frequently seems less disjunctive than the most experimental work in the book-stands as a catalog of sensual ruminations on various problems and opportunities of contemporary gay subjectivity. Facing the inextricability of love and mutability, which Whitman in Calamus identifies as the greatest sources of beauty, Liu offers sharp, evocative elegiac imagery: “A fountain pen// runs dry in the middle of the road.// As pages of some Promethean text riffled// by the wind. By evening it is gone-// everything that we own less than the moon” (27). The handsomely enigmatic last clause could signify the moon-like zero of disappearance or the notion that the lovers retain the sublime ethos of their passionate union while losing all “lesser” “possessions.” Exploring, as Whitman does more abstractly, the psychosexual fragility of individual relationships in which one may find “no music in this house//, but a broken queen-size bed” (32), Liu calls for renewal of passion and language “by a voice that feeds me in this dire/hour of need” (30). Direct references to AIDS are rare in this poem, but the pandemic’s background presence surely accounts for part of the distinction between Calamus’ predominant optimism and “To Calamus’s” frequent sense of destabilization and anxiety.

     Among other topics, “To Calamus” also confronts the vexed relation of sexuality and Christian institutions, agony as problematic transcendence, and the interplay of gay openness and closeting amid the potential for violently (and ironically sexually) enacted homophobia, “where viral// crusades ram steel rods into our doors” (39). Liu’s frank depiction of the intensity of a brief, random sexual encounter, stripped of moralizing but tinged ironically with tropes of auto mechanics, could not be farther from Whitman’s delicately sexualized tropes and his idealizations about male “adhesiveness”: “The phone uncradled// in a piss-stained booth while a stranger// hammers me with his hips, nailing// my body down through the god-hole.// The hood still hot to touch-exhaust// caught in the choke hold of a burning// manifold” (34). Section V, “The Poem as Incarnation of Bodily Want” places the theme of sexual submission and suffering in a familiar Christian context: “Eden we never knew but Calvary.// Nailed into place as the ravens// dove down” (31). The verb “dove” provides a stinging reminder that these diving “ravens” of “Calvary” are eclipsing the impact of the “dove” of peace. Indeed, Christian prohibitions are precisely what Liu is resisting in trying to assert that “copious ejaculate” could be “a sign// of Being. The whole room lit with it.”

“In Flagrante Delicto,” another long sequence, consists of eight long-lined sections of eight single-line stanzas. Here, while entertaining many of the same themes found in “To Calamus” and other poems in Hard Evidence, Liu deploys a punctuationless, fragment-inflected flux to collage numerous images with frenzied energy. Take, for example, the second section, “Like Boys Next Door”:

channel surfing from baseball scores to late-night news for images

of ourselves in vain no faggots here in uniform only shirts that say

repent or perish as closets open wide their flaming doors just try on

the face of a christ that took a lifetime of our suffering to achieve

last-pick sissies striking out foreheads marked with ash as tongues

begin to slide like eels in public parking tempting boys who’d flock

to sport some jockstraps stuffed down throats where teeth had been

knocked-out a pack of trading-cards some drag from base to base (83)_

     After a reference to the enforcement of gay invisibility in the military and problematic (under) representation in the media followed by “coverage” of implicitly homophobic, fundamentalist calls for repentance, Liu counters with the “flaming” vigor of coming out for many in the gay liberation movement since the Stonewall era. Answering the fundamentalists’ persecution, he links the unfortunate “achievement” of “a lifetime of [gay] suffering” at the hands of heterosexism with Jesus’ much briefer agony on the cross. Those who are branded early with stigmata because they lack the social currency of athletic competence fall prey to pederasts’ eel-like tongues, but at the end of the section, the narrative becomes too clotted with possibility for paraphrase to have any assurance. “To sport” can be a prepositional phrase or an infinitive, and the image of the stuffed jockstrap might indicate physical violence against the gay boys or the gays’ performing oral sex on the “jocks.” Further, the nouns “trading-cards,” “drag,” and “base,” since they are tropes of baseball and sex, indicate how the “pack” of gay youths attempt to “trade” one form of socialization, sports culture, for another, while still being negatively marked by the first. Liu’s multiple meanings enrich and complicate, rather than mute, ideological critique.

     Just as the subject matter of Liu’s earlier work informs and, in some sense, provides a foundation for the experimental forays of Hard Evidence, the greater range of signification in the latter is a felicitous expansion of a tendency toward complex irony and linguistic play that was already present in the former. Therefore, I find that the peaceful coexistence of experimentation and relatively traditional narrative/lyric in Hard Evidence has a synergistic (rather than a disorienting) effect on the experience of reading the book.