Sandra Lim
“A challenge for every writer, I imagine, is to understand that real exploration involves real risk; it can be scary and exhilarating even to discover unexpected aspects of one’s own sensibility in writing a poem.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Under Sandra Lim’s steerage words regain their liveliness. Loveliest Grotesque is something grand, something glorious. Finally we have a return to the kinds of awakenings only poetry can provide.”
Sandra Lim is the author of three poetry collections, most recently The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton, 2021), which Louise Glück has called “breathtaking.” Her previous books of poetry are The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize selected by Louise Glück, and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). Her poems have appeared widely in journals such as The New York Review of Books, Poetry, Literary Imagination, The Baffler, and The New Republic, among others. Her essays and criticism are included in the anthologies Among Margins: An Anthology on Aesthetics (Ricochet, 2016), The Poem’s Country (Pleiades, 2018), and Counterclaims: Poets and Poetries (Dalkey Archive Press, 2020).
She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Jentel Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute. Her work has also been honored by an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and letters, the Levis Reading Prize, and a Pushcart Prize.
When asked about her advice for young writers, Lim responded: “Be unwavering in your dedication to make art, keep choosing it, stay passionate and ambitious! I still don’t know anything better than writing poetry. But I would also say don’t be afraid to become moderated by life. Not in the sense of diminishment exactly, but in the sense of being exercised more fully by it somehow. I say this because in the past, I often felt a victim of my own overweening will when it came to writing. I think now I was unknowingly putting up a wall between writing and life—some of this, a natural impulse to master or control life through art. But I’m now more interested in letting whatever makes up my life have its authentic say; I trust it more.”
Born in Seoul, Korea, Lim grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She earned a BA from Stanford University, a PhD from the University of California Berkeley, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and lives in Cambridge, MA.
“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 … Lim’s poetry rewards the reader with exquisite writing.”
Open and right-click to download
(c) Young Suh
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
