Sandra Lim

From the winner of the 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize, chosen by Louise Glück, a daring and exuberant new collection.

Poems

The Wilderness

In this gorgeous third collection, Sandra Lim investigates desire, sexuality, and dream with sinewy intelligence and a startling freshness.

The Curious Thing

Double-consciousness and the Protean Self in Sylvia Plath's Ariel

Poetry. "LOVELIEST GROTESQUE is a darkly fascinating book. It's a sweet, shape-shifting creature and a fun postmodern romp. Page after page fills with energetic surprises, keeping the reader intrigued--formal quatrains juxtaposed against prose vignettes... short-line riffs against skinny sonnets against a ballad that spreads across the page against a pantoum with the word "orient" in it. Finally, the slippery slope of too much fun might stop for a nano moment to contemplate an important existential question: "Why were there manatees at all?" Obviously, the answer is this: after 9/11, in the new millennium, all formal discourses must explode, splinter and fragment and coalesce again into a stunning, new voice."--Marilyn Chin

Loveliest Grotesque

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.

Sandra Lim

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