The Curious Thing
Poems
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
In this gorgeous third collection, Sandra Lim investigates desire, sexuality, and dream with sinewy intelligence and a startling freshness.
Truthful, sensuous, and intellectually relentless, the poems in The Curious Thing are compelling meditations on love, art making, solitude, female fate, and both the mundane and serious principles of life. Sandra Lim’s poetry displays stinging wit and a tough-minded approach to her own experiences: She speaks with Jean Rhys about beauty, encounters the dark loneliness that can exist inside a relationship, and discovers a coiled anger on a hot summer day. An extended poem sequence slyly revolves the meanings of finding oneself astray in midlife. A steely strength courses through the volume’s myriad discoveries—Lim’s lucidity and tenderness form a striking complement to her remarkable metaphors and the emotional clamor of her material.
Animated by a sense of reckoning and a piercing inwardness, these anti-sentimental poems nevertheless celebrate the passionate and empathetic subjective life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The introspective third collection from Lim (The Wilderness) sees the poet train her eye on the retreating shoreline of a life, a "thousand mile scent// Going all through the body." In these measured, graceful pages, Lim is "trying// to get at the work of the matter" through memory. "Part of me watches the rest of me being/ anxious, superior, and invaded/ by longing," she writes. Many of these poems double as ars poeticas, revealing that the urge to take stock of past decisions, relationships, and ways of being marries naturally with artistic self-scrutiny: "My moods were like conspirators in an opera/ then strange-faced, like a jury," she writes; "Florid eighteenth-century music against/ taciturn furniture. And there was just me and my human concerns." While Lim's images are striking, some readers may find the air a bit too rarefied: "Summertime: parole for academics./ Long days, low yield." Elsewhere, she suggests that "here is more to life than writing," but in a book as scrupulously attentive to craft as this one, writing reads as the main event. "The other day, my friend declared that she favored/ straightforward narratives: clear, unassuming, and, if tart,/ amiably so. I felt the reproach," she admits. Readers seeking contemplative poems executed with quiet flair will take pleasure here.
