The Bold Loneliness of a Real Life: A Review of Sandra Lim’s “The Curious Thing”

by Julia Roch

Millennials are the loneliest generation, according to the people who know that sort of thing. Of all the wild accusations thrown at Gen Y, this one I’m inclined to believe. But despite the self-indulgent snowflake image we suffer under, the millennial way of dealing with our unprecedented yearning is to acknowledge it, poke fun at it, and then carry on. Yes, we’re miserable. Yes, we’re tired. What’s new? This casual frankness towards difficult subjects defines the millennial spirit and is also found in spades in Sandra Lim’s book, The Curious Thing. Though not a 90s kid herself, Lim treats themes of love, loneliness, and existential panic with this same sharp, clean candor. She is not harsh, nor forgiving, only honest. In Lim’s clear language and subtle humor, we find moments of joy along with pain—or in the poet’s own words, “Inside the cold of it, there’s a sort of festival.”

Lim’s economy with words is not rare in contemporary poetry, but there is a unique sense of carefulness about her writing. Influenced by fellow poet Louise Glück, Lim likewise takes familiar moments of “true plain being” and makes them new, not with an overcomplicated metaphor, but with an everyday image that is all the more surprising for its simplicity. In Lim’s “Barking Noises,” a domestic dispute causes a man to leave in anger, hating his partner and her “nasty mental life.” But the poem doesn’t end in tears or bitterness. Instead:

She sat at the kitchen table

until the windows got dark. She dipped

a cold chicken drumstick into a saucer of salt

and ate it. It was delicious.

Lim doesn’t indulge in self-pity; she offers a tasty snack. Packed in this choice is spite and hardness and comfort and spark. For the reader, it is delicious.

This use of gustatory images elevates Lim’s work. Some writers take the modern trend toward “plain language” so far as to be boring, but not Lim. Yes, she is careful, even minimalistic at times, but her lines themselves are tasty. There is an undeniable richness to the worlds she creates. “The Absolutist,” a tribute to Lim’s grandmother, showcases Lim’s deftness with sensory details and scene-making:

I can see her waiting for beverage deliveries, scrubbing down

sticky tables, enduring the smell of ripe garbage in the summers.

She always emerges from the building late in the day, dark and slim,

and walks home like someone floating down the Nile.

Even when her characters are not eating, Lim’s diction contains the instinctive, searching energy of an emptiness wanting to be filled. “Nibbling at what lay before me,” she writes, as if she is hungry, if not for food, then for joy, love, company—that yearning we millennials know too well.

In the three sections of The Curious Thing, the second explores the love (or not-really-love) between a woman and her mathematician partner. The third part, depicting the aftermath of their breakup, is the climax of the collection, where Lim’s voice truly shines. Without a love story, her speaker seems to flounder and look for meaning, until “There is just me and my human concerns.” Those human concerns and the moods surrounding them evolve from weary to angry to confident to inspired. Lim treats moments of optimism and discovery with frankness, too, and they ring truer that way. The immediacy of Lim’s images and the candor of her tone are just as suited to wonder as they are to longing. 

When Lim writes, “Why must I urge you to feel the smallness of your life?”, she does not mean that our lives are so small, they are meaningless; she asks us to hold heartbreak and sorrow and loneliness the same way we hold love and curiosity and joy. It all deserves honesty, but also levity. What good is wallowing in pain? We are all lonely, all hungry, all happy, too. Spending painstaking hours attempting to delineate between these feelings, to assign them respective metaphors, is similarly futile. Afterall, “Part of what makes life shameful and exciting / is the fact of being gripped / by something true that you just barely intuit.”

The Curious Thing may be a slim volume, but its power is in its brevity. Sandra Lim, an award-winning poet with two previous books, knows how to maximize the power of a line, so that not one word is wasted. Though she may not always be kind, she is clear, and her distinctive frankness is completely fitting for 21st century woe. While she grapples with “the bold loneliness of a real life,” her work is not doom and gloom—it is refreshing, subtly delicious, a pallet cleanser in our overstimulated lives, and the perfect collection for modern adults, who are “anxious, superior, and invaded / by longing.”

The Curious Thing by Sandra Lim was published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. in 2021.

Julia Roch is the poetry editor of Barnstorm Journal. A graduate of Amherst College and a former copywriter, she is currently pursuing an MFA degree at the University of New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Oberon, Mantis, Cutthroat, and other journals.