Sandra Lim’s The Curious Thing is about an apperception of love and the tension one undergoes to discover the origins of a desire. Simultaneously, it observes a resistance to discovering what draws one to the other—whether the other be place, person, thing, or self. What happens when love evolves differently from the way one’s imagination had it? Or when one’s superficialities remain stubbornly legible? How does one reconcile the immoderate birthright of this “brief pageant of being” (from the poem, ‘Jean Rhys’) with the natural desire for “someone to look at me,/ in all my youth and feminine momentum” (‘Boston’)?
I enjoyed Lim’s work, and felt compelled to read through her sharp, mobile prosody a few times, in admiration of the clarity of emotions rendered with exactitude. She wants “the grieving joy of words/ set down right” (‘Jean Rhys’).
The book is divided in three sections. The second section begins with the place poem, ‘Boston,’ while the first and third introduce a place, ‘Chicago,’ and ‘San Franscisco,’ after a preliminary poem has introduced the theme of the section. The sequence of poems predominantly alternates between a stanzaic blank verse and unrhymed couplets or tercets.
There is an architecture to The Curious Thing’s structure that serves as a macrocosmic example of the ideas motivating Lim’s poetic nous. On the one hand, Lim organizes the sequence of poems symmetrically, as though there were a relation between first, last, and middle, second, second to last. At the same time, Lim appeals to a candid, semi-humorous, semi-sad, self-deprecation that admits “my need to interpret and sort everything” (‘San Franscisco’), that seeks a place where there are “no predispositions” (‘A Shaggy Dog Story’), where “existence [is] no longer borne/ as means or ends” (‘Spinoza Says’), and “what lay before me” (‘Chicago’, ‘Something Means Everything’) can be met by a good appetite (‘Happiness’).
There is an undercurrent “root fire” (‘Something Means Everything’) that rejects exterior interpretation for interior contemplation, that trusts the daimon over the critic—but something that makes Lim particularly interesting to me is her dutiful and sardonic awareness of the critic, of her own interior critic, made apparent in ‘Pastoral,’ where “We became ugly with use, our questions travelling too fast, no one stopping to answer,” in ‘The Stronger,’ where the female subject is “a moron of joy.” There are many more examples of her unapologetic, humorous, and profound self-reflecting phrasings that derive from experience on the edge of intuition and doubt.
Sandra Lim is a gifted poet whose work seems unlikely to remain satisfied with its reflection for too long. I found The Curious Thing to be psychologically acute, linguistically concise, almost gnomic at times. There is a definite sadness or sense of loss in her work, in the way she plays with a façade of listless apathy—but that is a charade whose antipode reckons love, philosophy, bright minds, places, and a care for precise expression. The vividity of her language, accompanied by a knowledge of the classics and sense of wanting to write and question what seems true, makes Lim’s The Curious Thing a valuable read.
