Natalie Lim (Amanda Lim)

Elegy for Opportunity has that unwilling-to-be-embarrassed, declarative quality many debuts possess, an earnestness that hasn’t been spoiled by over-crafting or listening too closely to the demands of CanLit. It’s a (presumably?) millennial poet’s first urgent call-out to the zeitgeist that’s been (presumably?) built up over a lifetime of preparation for Earth death. The digital-boom generation has had no choice but to become experts in tactical coping so that we might, miraculously, believe in life’s ability to endure despite impending societal and environmental breakdown. These self-reassurances – and inevitable kickbacks to panic – are complexly illustrated by Natalie Lim’s voice-driven poetics. 

Two of the speaker’s coping mechanisms oscillate like walkie-talkie messages throughout the book: a series of date-titled love poems which make undeniable the power of love and simple pleasures to conquer all; and a string of elegies for the anthropomorphized Mars rover, “Opportunity,” who the speaker suggests was named aptly but also as a symptom of hubris, reducing the machine to its usefulness to humanity (“we are tender even / in our cruelty”). In a bold and necessary move that pays off, the speaker suggests it’s this same hubris of naming that has been a colonial violence on Indigenous Peoples. See also: “everything is stolen land and I am cashing in.”

The love and Opportunity poems converge in “Elegy for Opportunity IV / X Date”; the speaker’s lover and the Mars rover now cohabit the “you.” In this poem, the speaker’s self-concerned voice (“if it’s not in front of me, / it can’t hurt me. it doesn’t exist”) and the anxious empathy she has for the universe are synthesized. This makes the book’s self-interest feel honest and endearing rather than irritating, the hope grounded rather than naive. I recognize my own experience in her crisis at trying to hold two incompatible realities at once – one in which we aren’t worth saving from the disasters of our own making, another that bears every good and beautiful thing we’ve ever done.  

The speaker mostly chooses to exist in the latter reality. For a book with such an elegiac focus, there were many poems I wanted to slip inside, such as the priceless feminine joy of “Girl Camping” and the utopic languor of “Chief Editor of The Moon News.” This is another of the speaker’s coping mechanisms – imagining a future in which we’ve seized the opportunities to be better, happier, to grow together responsibly inside that possibility: “it’s the strangest thing, learning to live / in a world that doesn’t need saving.” 

Lim’s speaker takes every opportunity to reassure us that we can still exist “in a different season,” even if she sometimes doesn’t believe it herself. She generously tends to other beings, human and non-human alike. This, it seems, is the key to our survival: we live on through the vessels into which we pour our joy and hope. And even if our motivation is selfish, can it be, if the net gain is positive? To love and be loved seems like a too-simple solution to the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, but this poet has grappled enough with the question that the rest of us are free to believe “it happened all / on the first try.”