WINNER OF THE 2019 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD

Can poems mourn the unmourned? In Obits. a speaker tries and fails to write obituaries for those whose memorials are missing, those who are represented only as statistics. She considers victims of mass deaths, fictional characters, and her own aunt, asking what does it mean to be an 'I' mourning a 'you' when both have been othered? Centring vulnerability, the various answers to this question pass through trauma, depression, and the experience of being a mixed-race queer woman.

T. Liem is the author of Obits. (Coach House, 2018), which was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award, and won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award as well as the the A.M. Klein Prize. Their writing has been published in Apogee, Plenitude, The Boston Review, Grain, Maisonneuve, Catapult, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. Their essay about family and growing up with Indonesian and British heritages, "Rice Cracker," won the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize in 2015. They are from Alberta and live in Montreal, Tio’Tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territories.

T. Liem's profile page

"Liem’s poems are graceful and captivating and she is not afraid to show the dirt, stains, and bugs that are left behind when a body dies. Instead of hiding behind clichés of grief, Liem finds a way to unearth what was never buried to give some of those without an obituary a place to call home." – Amy LeBlanc, Plenitude Magazine