The Wilderness

W.W. Norton, 2014

Winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize

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, The Wilderness is one of the most thrilling books of poetry I have read in many years.”

—Louise Glück, prize citation

Praise For The Wilderness

“The wilderness of which Sandra Lim writes does not sprawl. It lives in all of us, but it must be coaxed into daylight; it must be courted truly to be known. Lim's elegantly made poems constitute that act of courtship: rarely has the beauty of our desert places been made more seductively plain.”

— James Longenbach

"No one does the darkness quite as well as Sandra Lim, and one comes away from her fearful investigations not cured, but changed. Of Piero della Francesca, Philip Guston wrote: ‘A different fervor, grave and delicate, moves in the daylight of his pictures.’ So too in these terrific new poems.”

— Graham Foust

“Original and affecting … The Wilderness … is masterful.”

— Barbara Berman, The Rumpus

“The incalculable sum of The Wilderness enshadows any and all of its individual assertions, alerts, and advisements. But there are moments, as in the concluding lines from ‘Aubade,’ when the whole is glimpsed and with a sudden jolt one realizes how much Sandra Lim has accomplished in this splendid book.”

—Ron Slate, On the Seawall

“The Wilderness is one of the best books of poems I’ve read in years.”

—Randall Mann, The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry

“One gets a sense that her language is a volatile surface.”

—Rosanna Oh, 32 Poems

“Lim’s greatest strength … is in the glowing freshness of her metaphors, and her willingness to let them act as linchpins for deeper truths.”

—Valerie Duff, Salamander

“The inner and outer world clash in the best of Lim’s poems, most of which are infused with energy and marked by a deep searching about life.”

—Library Journal