“[Sandra Lim’s] poems have a prose elegance; they are cool, detached, ruminative, with a kind of whistle-in-the-dark bravado.”
Wry and unsparing, the radiant poems in Sandra Lim’s The Givens move deftly from the deeply personal to the mythic and world-historical. A master of sensory imagery, Lim offers us all the earthly pleasures and sensations of our daily lives―bread, cake, and meat; body, breath, and song; roses, trees, and stars―turning each moment over as one might turn over a rock to reveal a whole ecosystem. Enlisting these quotidian instants in the service of metaphysical inquiry, The Givens takes the measure of our existence with grandeur and charm: one moment we are struck by awe or darkness, the next we brush it off and move on to another day, another epoch. Everyday moments launch spiritual questions and the subtle truths and surprises within them; to eat and to joke is to think about the meaning of life.