The Curious Thing
Poems
10 November 2023
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 clamour 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.
Reviews
"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" — Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
"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
"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
"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
"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
Also By: Sandra Lim 
The Wilderness: Poems
Paperback, 2014
From the winner of the 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize, chosen by Louise Glück, a daring and exuberant new collection.
The Wilderness: Poems
E Book, 2014
From the winner of the 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize, chosen by Louise Glück, a daring and exuberant new collection.
