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

The Wilderness: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Lim, Sandra

Poetry

W.W.Norton&Company

The Curious Thing: Poems

Product Description 
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. 
 Review 
"Lim’s voice, which is fiercer and more dexterous than ever, brings into being a collection of powerful, dark, and inscrutable poems that defy gravity." 
 ― 
Aria Aber, Los Angeles Review of Books\n"What is fun about these poems and delightful is the way that they have this very interior elliptical quality, as if they’re being narrated by the very wise, very wry protagonist of a Russian novel." 
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Tess Taylor, NPR\n"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, Nobel Prize–winning author of Faithful and Virtuous Night\n"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." 
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Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous\n"Stunning... Part of the power [of this collection] is in the brutal, quick associations, the way the poet moves so efficiently and fearlessly, bewildering pronouns and opening delicious ambiguities. Understatement combined with precision." 
 ― 
Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's\n" 
The Curious Thing…beguiles… The collection itself is a curious thing wherein restraint belies a charged underbelly, and surface clarity shimmers over ideological depths." 
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Aumaine Rose Smith, Kenyon Review\n"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." 
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Monica Youn, author of Blackacre\n"Rarely does one find a contemporary poet quite as instructive in the consistent employment of finely-constructed, rich abstraction." 
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Ploughshares\n"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." 
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Victoria Chang, author of Obit\n"Reading these poems, one capitulates to their ferocity of expression and precision of sentiment." 
 ― 
Nathan Blansett, Poetry Northwest 
 About the Author 
Sandra Lim was born in Seoul, South Korea. She is the author of three poetry collections, 
The Curious Thing, 
Loveliest Grotesque and 
The Wilderness, chosen by Louise Glück for the Barn

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.

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

Kore Press

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Books by Lim, Sandra

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lim, Sandra. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Wilderness: Poems

The Curious Thing: Poems

The Curious Thing: Poems

Loveliest Grotesque