Walking Backwards: New Poems

by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim

Walking Backwards is about making a home when you are a nomad, and adding an American self to the many selves that the world's myriad, bewildering places throw at one body. It is about how travel and restlessness wrench us and teach us about ourselves, how our losses compound our loves, and how endlessly absorbing the idea of home remains, particularly when we keep losing sight of it. Orbiting the globe, this collection narrates encounters in a transnational American's circuit. As much about Hong Kong as the west coast of the United States, it bundles transients and family, nature and city, the still point within and characters everywhere, to produce a fresh, ethnically inflected poetics.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 16, 2010

About the author

Lim is a professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has also taught internationally at the National University of Singapore, the National Institute Education of Nanyang Technological University, and was the Chair Professor at the University of Hong Kong where she also taught poetry and creative writing. She has authored several books of poems, short stories, and criticism, and serves as editor and co-editor of numerous scholarly works. Lim is a cross-genre writer, although she identifies herself as a poet.

Reviews

[Richard Cho · Rating 4 out of 5]

How convenient
to be so busy:
chores and papers
meetings talks
washing up cleaning
hemming days
in stitches, all tucks,
no ruffles,
and late at night
another day
gone to see,
unborne.

[M Delea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Travel around the world with the wonderful poet as she explores places, identities, and the meaning of place. One of my favorite poets!