The Curious Thing

Out NOW FRom W.W. Norton

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 this volume are compelling meditations on love, art making, solitude, female fate, and both the mundane and serious principles of life. 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.

Praise For The Curious thing

“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

“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

“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

“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