The Curious Thing
Sandra Lim
W. W. Norton & Company, 2021
Review by Clara Otto
The Curious Thing by Sandra Lim explores dreams, writing, and the banality of life. The poems in this collection feel as though the speaker is trying to steel the reader against life’s disappointments—they know the reader won’t listen, they know the reader must experience their own losses—nevertheless, the speaker offers exquisitely sharp warnings like:
On my way to fulfill
some banal commission, I’m conscious
of waiting for the season
to run its course,
and of accumulating an anger
around a simple truth:
all perfect friendships
eventually come to an end.
(“Portrait In Summer”)
Throughout the poems, there is a sense of a life lived. The speaker has made some peace with everyday life, with heartache, and relishes joy that they know cannot last. For example, in “The Beginning of Spring” they say:
All winter our house was warm and deaf.
I could just see the few white flowers
outside the window. A true happiness occurred.
Don’t stand there now asking to be loved.
This reprimand immediately following “a true happiness” foreshadows both what is to come in this particular poem and also a larger pattern across Lim’s collection; happiness is followed by disappointment, friendships and love end, and we all must wake from sweet dreams into a dark reality. In “The Beginning of Spring” the speaker goes on to describe how their arms loosen from around their lover, how their relationship ends “as [their] premonition told [them] it would.”
Throughout The Curious Thing, dreams are a recurring motif—what happens in the dream world is as significant as what happens in the waking world. In “Something Means Everything,” the speaker recalls “a long and mysterious fever” they had when they were four years old. While the speaker is sick, they see a beautiful young woman and when that woman smiles the speaker sees “that she had no teeth at all.” They and their mother cannot remember if this happened in a dream or if it happened in reality. The beautiful woman’s toothless smile mirrors the inversion in “The Beginning of Spring”—whenever the reader thinks that Lim may have settled on a beautiful or sentimental image, she swiftly complicates our understanding of the world of the poem.
The speaker is also interested in dreams as desire. In “San Francisco,” the speaker is living what seems to be a solitary life. They are anxious and desperate to understand the world around them. Their upstairs neighbour is a hoarder who describes his dreams to the speaker. He:
dreamed of having a Petit Trianon with a vast garden
to walk in and dog roses lavishing a limitless dining room table.
Of course, there was no table, because there was no dining room.
Obviously, there was never a garden to walk in.
There is tenderness in how Lim’s speaker recalls their neighbour’s dreams. Though this poem is only nineteen lines, the neighbour is vivid. There is a sensitivity to class in this poem that is not condescending or fetishizing. Lim’s speaker is not above their neighbour and their neighbour has the dignity to dream.
In “The Mountaintop” the themes Lim is working with coalesce. The speaker reflects on how people long for order and peace, forgetting that they are “a bag of blood.” An interpreter, Lim’s speaker wants to find meaning. The final stanza of this poem concludes:
What’s bad in one story
is good in another. Something has made you brave.
There is more to life than writing.
These lines illustrate what Lim’s speaker has been struggling with throughout the collection: nothing is constant—life has no fixed meanings. Through writing, the speaker has tried to create order, but in these lines, they recognize that this is a fruitless endeavour. It is because of this fruitlessness that pleasure is so important to Lim’s speaker—its delights do not need to have meaning. The speaker’s awareness of how short-lived pleasure can be only sweetens their appreciation of it.
A kaleidoscope of ruthless observations, evocative questions, and a desire to understand, The Curious Thing is a reflection on the unknowability of the world around us.
Clara Otto is a queer Canadian writer living on the ancestral and unceded lands of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples. Currently, she is an MFA student at the University of British Columbia. Her work has been published in Plenitude Magazine, Ruminate, The Puritan, and elsewhere.