Sandra Lim's Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006)

Some favourite passages:


Fall shudders red and ochre, clean through to a various pain.

*

Once, inside a night of live stars and other improbable sky lights, the conversation seemed indispensable. I'll be so willing. Ever was. Ordinary behavior, and you can walk there.

from "A Village Journal"

I wanted to see the themes grow inside us

like a talent or a tumor. Pure accident.

from "Last Mash Note"

Survival & reverie salt the palate....

from "Ballad of the Last Chance"

--sub-rosa ways of understanding self and others. The blue streak you take as a personal asterisk.

from "Where Metaphorical Moves Get Started"

...the thickening allusions alighted on all our shoulders with a look of loneliness.

the end of "What Is an Image?

                                        So there

we are, in low relief: creaturely, comely,

deducible wholly by what we have lost.

the end of "Year of the Gallows Birds"

The saddening ways slam

back and forth like a metal screendoor.

opening lines of

"You Could Feel That Freedom Coming On Too"

So often you don't think,

"Little nicks of monstrosity, I shall be splendid in it."

last lines of "Just Disaster"

Intent on being expressive rather than lovely, they are practically breaking with light and dark.

*

Dear unkind world, should we wonder after quiddity?

*

These rifts, these hungry expressibles, they are swiftly drawing me on.

from "There Is No Wing Like Meaning"

There is ground between loving and being pleased. See, it is a city unto itself.

from "'Wish You Were Here'"

The ferocity of the world inside has the might of weeds.

*

I feel so "personal" despite the fact that I am standing alongside myself, subject to dispersal.

*

I sing as a girl shedding the fever garden, as a boy tasting the knife of her. Word-slung and feral, I happen upon "those places in the body that have no language" but there really is no shielding in the end.

*

You'd like something of maximum vehemence and physical grace. Instead, "A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!"

from "Equilibrium"

(NB This poem has footnotes I couldn't easily include here.)

I hang the air with barbeque smoke

winding up my walk and my weft.

I longitude, I latitude, I spangle

from the core.

from "Touring, Touring, Gone"

Much later, what emerged unexpectedly but poppy. Nodding red, nodding orange, but always darkly nodding away. Between her and poppy, a torn-up world of cause and effect, pasts and prologues, broken clocks, the clatter in parting.

last stanza of "Afterword"

And the indifference of the island

bellows from shelf to shelf. A turtle rubs along.

from "Blind Future"

Loveliest Grotesque is available in the UK from Foyle's.