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.

Moving through myths of the American landscape, the fatalism of American Puritanism, family history, New England winters, aesthetic theory, and the suavities and anxieties of contemporary life, the poems in this astonishing collection ultimately speak about the individual soul s struggle with its own meaning. In its stern and quiet way Sandra Lim s The Wilderness is one of the most thrilling books of poetry I have read in many years (Louise Gluck).

From Aubade

From the last stars to sunrise the world is dark and enduring and emptiness has its place. Then, to wake each day to the world s unwavering limits, you have to think about passion differently, again."