The Curious Thing

Reviews

"Lim’s voice, which is fiercer and more dexterous than ever, brings into being a collection of powerful, dark, and inscrutable poems that defy gravity." — Aria Aber, Los Angeles Review of Books

"What is fun about these poems and delightful is the way that they have this very interior elliptical quality, as if they’re being narrated by the very wise, very wry protagonist of a Russian novel." — Tess Taylor, NPR

"These are poems of passion and self-scrutiny and female rage, but Sandra Lim is not a poet of explosive feeling. The poems have a prose elegance; they are cool, detached, ruminative, with a kind of whistle-in-the-dark bravado. Here is a mind studying itself and its ambivalence, exact at every turn and, by the end, breathtaking." — Louise Glück, Nobel Prize–winning author of Faithful and Virtuous Night

"I stop my life when I see Sandra Lim’s name and enter her little worlds with big feelings. In her hands, precision and audacity meld into a performance of quiet, implacable force. This collection, too, is a force. It has its own gravity. It shows us what can be revealed when we’re pulled so close to language we can’t look away, language where the sentence is clear, concussive, and reigning." — Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

"Stunning... Part of the power [of this collection] is in the brutal, quick associations, the way the poet moves so efficiently and fearlessly, bewildering pronouns and opening delicious ambiguities. Understatement combined with precision." — Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's

"The Curious Thing…beguiles… The collection itself is a curious thing wherein restraint belies a charged underbelly, and surface clarity shimmers over ideological depths." — Aumaine Rose Smith, Kenyon Review

"To read Sandra Lim’s poetry is to witness feats of naming as exhilarating and daring as creation itself. You encounter states of perception, shades of emotion that are so elusive as to have escaped your attention but that call forth deep echoes of recognition. Her poems are a series of quiet miracles, inspiring both pleasure and awe." — Monica Youn, author of Blackacre

"Rarely does one find a contemporary poet quite as instructive in the consistent employment of finely-constructed, rich abstraction." — Ploughshares

"In this stark, steely, and beautiful third book of poems, Sandra Lim evokes the spectacular feeling of being unmoored and unshaped. Filled with declaratives and surprising illogical logic, these poems glitter with the lights of thinking." — Victoria Chang, author of Obit

"Reading these poems, one capitulates to their ferocity of expression and precision of sentiment." — Nathan Blansett, Poetry Northwest