At the convergence of Asian American/Asian Diasporic Studies and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, “Lyric Torsion” draws from a rich set of interdisciplinary conversations in psychoanalysis, the natural sciences, the environmental humanities, and visual and material culture. Torsion, from the Latin torquere, is defined as “the act of twisting, the force that causes twisting, or the state of being twisted.” Each of torsion’s multi-pronged definitions—as an action, a force, and a state of being—guide my intervention into a process in which Asian American poets revise, through disaggregation and re-assemblage, the racial self and subject at the center of a dissociated poetics. Informed by literary and cultural studies as well as critical studies of race, ethnicity, and migration, I draw on the psychoanalytic concept of racial dissociation and a critique of the universal, pathologized lyric speaker cloaked in whiteness to track an alternative logic to modern subject formation underwritten by Western empire. “Lyric Torsion” provides a fresh vantage for thinking through the relational friction that shows up in a lyric frame when we consider how states of interpsychic conflict come to bear on our understanding of self and subject. For the poets whose work I take up in this study, beingness brings to the fore the dissociated relationship between the poet and the speaking voice of the poem that has been naturalized through the Anglo-Western literary tradition and signified in the “lyric I.” To elaborate, I turn to an archive of poetry—including Don Mee Choi’s geopolitics of diasporic space in DMZ Colony (2020); Tan Lin’s theory of sampling in Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary (2010); Arthur Sze’s vision of synchronicity in The Redshifting Web (1998); and the aftermath of militarized violence in Hoa Nguyen’s A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (2021). In choosing to think beyond liberal empire and its spatial-colonial ordering of time, “Lyric Torsion” raises the potential of renewed channels of being and relation.