Walking Backwards: New Poems

Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca, Malaysia. Her Crossing the Peninsula won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize; she has published five more volumes of poetry, including What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say (West End Press, 1998), three short story collections, two novels and a prize-winning memoir, Among the White Moon Faces. She is professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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 bewildering places throw at one body. It is about how endlessly absorbing the idea of home remains, particularly when we keep losing sight of it. This collection bundles transients and family, nature and city, the still point within and characters every where to produce a fresh, ethnically inflected poetics.

"Shirley Lim searches for hope and home as she moves around the globe from California across the Pacific to her birthplace. Wherever she travels, or settles for a time she evokes and makes palpable a peace in the natural world's demands, resilience, and beauty...Lim's humor at sixty is wry, threaded with wisdom and loss."-Florence Howe, Founding Director Publisher, The Feminist Press at CUNY

"In lifelong exile, Shirley Geok-lin Lim writes a new poems from countries and islands all over the world. Her awed voice reaches our ears, and we get to know ourselves from myriad views. I love this poet who's "not being an honest woman!"-Maxine Hong Kingston, winner of two National Book Awards and author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey

"Through 'a bounty of words', with passion for exact observation, Shirley Geok-lin Lim writes of natures grandeur, of social injustice and solidarity, of release from compulsion in a personal epic of universal ways...Here we have China, California, childhood, travel, a gifted human's striving, treasuring, and hard won triumphs, a great poet's unstinting self-revelation."-Barry Spacks, author of Food for the Journey and nine other volumes of poetry