On The Curious Thing by Sandra Lim

New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2021. 58 pages. $26.95.

The Curious Thing, Sandra Lim’s third collection, beguiles. Its poems—which traffic in neat lines, adhere to the left margin, present simple diction, and switch deftly between understated tones—might tempt a reader to call them straightforward, even easy. But no. The collection itself is a curious thing wherein restraint belies a charged underbelly, and surface clarity shimmers over ideological depths. Throughout, the book demonstrates how easy it is to mistake one thing for another, as the speaker navigates between self and others, tests the bounds of order and chance, and interprets personal encounters recent and distantly past.

Such stakes are made clear when an early poem advises:

You don’t know what your story is about
when you begin it. And a love to measure past
and future loves against: the danger may be that it carries
the force of original thought, when in reality,
it is just what you have had with you
all along, the curious thing lying on your heart . . .

The collection’s three sections could be seen as structured around a romantic abandonment, though the variance of individual poems’ concerns and the tide of larger questions that arise in light of the relationship poems override any sense that the book is about a single matter. The first section casts a wide conceptual net: the word “now” appears five times in seven poems, like an attempt to bind memory in present understanding even as we are told the “spirit refuses the effort / of understanding” and that “there is no deeper meaning.”

That the book’s first poems are so disparate in content (about dwellings in previous cities, a childhood fever, conversations with artists or their works, the experience of holding a friend’s baby) frustratingly yet excellently undercuts the easier narrative drama of a separation (which the second section introduces more straightforwardly). In place of such narrative, readers are immediately invited to consider larger implications of love, entitlement, anticipation, privacy, interiority, and uncertainty before such themes are situated in a specific description of intimacy and the fierce disappointments possible therein.

Nor do the breakup poems, when they arrive, simplify the first section’s loyalty to contradiction and variousness. While personal pronouns ground the narrative (“Make him come back, she said, / her voice like something brought up intact / from the cold center of a lake” or “Our warm, clandestine complicity had the force of a new actuality” or “I could touch her at any time. All the while / she was thinking of the work she wanted to do, despite / her absolute, unreasoning devotion to me”), they also magnify the book’s overarching questions. What do our commitments, failed and /or lasting, reveal about us over the course of time? What is owed a beloved? What can be made of the physical world? How to chart interiority? Why do we long for certainty of memory, certainty in anything?

As one might expect in a collection of counterpoint and anticlimax, the book’s third section offers no direct answers. Instead, it gets meta about the project’s concerns, as in the poem “Spinoza Says”:

When there is anything
you want very much,
you are making up a story

all the time,
of how you will get it
and how it will be . . .

“I was a collector too / with my need to interpret and sort everything” another poem admits. These awarenesses echo references to writing and the writing life that appear throughout the book: a line about the difficulty of conveying the heart, mention of work as security, a belief that words can be “set down right.” Such discussions—personal narrative filtered through a larger conversation about the affordances and constraints of narrative—are the depths that most characterize the book. Their abstraction at times makes the project feel remote, sealed-off. But one does not get a sense that Lim promotes distance for distance’s sake. Rather, she reveals how the process of attempted understanding can become more important than anything specific one seeks to understand.

Other reviewers have called Lim a philosopher-poet, and the metaphysical bent of her last book, The Wilderness, is central in The Curious Thing too. Here, Lim seems most mystical when engaging an apparent body/soul dualism, which is displayed through the collection via an engagement with the physical world that feels cursory, elemental (her images tend to be plain, and quickly passed by; descriptions are sketch-like and used as props for ideas). Sometimes, she is explicit: “then there was my body, inside of my soul.” At others, such as in the long poem “Shaggy Dog Summer” from the book’s last section, she defends metaphysical tendencies with a type of humor, undercutting, but still serious:

I thump my casing without feeling:
too much material,

and the steady hubbub within
seems off the point.

All this is a pig of an undertaking,
just to touch thoughts.

And, later in the poem: “I think I have some capacity for abstract / reasoning, after / the world cools its details.” Yet, much as Lim distrusts the physical world, neither is the interior world any more predictable. There, a painful intelligence consistently undoes stated polarities. A book is a thought; a thought is a racing heart.

Despite uncertainty in mapping the self and its circumstances, other writers, artists, and their works appear plainly throughout the book, like trusted companions. “I saw all of Luis Buñuel’s films inside of a week,” one poem says. To Jean Rhys, another answers, “I hear you, Jean. Yours is a voice / disabused; and inside the cold of it, there’s a sort of festival.” Mention of Goethe’s “Heidenröslein” (“Rose on the Heath”) defends a barbed femininity, and the myth of Actaeon confirms images of humiliation and revenge. Rich as these other voices may be, some poems’ tendency to truncate rather than risk epiphany can make the references feel heavy in minimal scaffolding. If they seem dropped in then abandoned, however, perhaps their treatment can be read as emphasis to the book’s narrative threads on desertion.

Most affecting to me about The Curious Thing is its poems’ consistent longing for, attempt to secure, and tendency to distrust clarity, and the ways that through and beyond such tension the speaker at times opens into a kind of freedom. Clarity of narrative, clarity of self-reportage, clarity of memory, clarity of experience, clarity of devotion, clarity of logic—all come under question, sometimes contradictorily. “I was not always kind, but I was clear,” one poem announces. To which another responds: “The other day, my friend declared that she favored / straightforward narratives: clear, unassuming, and if tart, / amiably so. I felt the reproach.” Great pressure of work and desire generates ambivalence. But so, too, does such labor occasionally vent in the direction of ecstasy:

and I am trying

          to get at the work of the matter.
The gap is shaped like a person, the longing

to be with and to be alone, you give time
to all these things.

It goes on till all hours
          and somebody must clean up afterward;

then the silence begins wonderfully, wonderfully.