Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has published five other volumes of poetry: No Man’s Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989); Monsoon History (1994), a retrospective selection of her work; What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say (1998); and Listening to the Singer (2007), a collection of poems out of Malaysia. Bill Moyers featured Lim for a PBS special on American poetry, “Fooling with Words.” She is also the author of three books of short stories; a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1997 American Book Award for non-fiction); two novels, Joss and Gold (2001) and Sister Swing (2006); and a children’s novel, Princess Shawl (2008). Herfirst novel was welcomed by Rey Chow as an “elegantly crafted tale [that] places Lim among the most imaginative and dexterous storytellers writing in the English language today.” Lim’s co-edited anthology The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology received the 1990 American Book Award. She has published critical studiesandedited/co-edited many volumes and special issues of journals, including recently Transnational Asia Pacific; Power, Race and Gender in Academe; Asian American Literature: An Anthology; Tilting the Continent: An Anthology of South-east Asian American Writing, and special issues of Ariel, Tulsa Studies, Studies in the Literary Imagination, and Concentric. Her work has appeared in journals such as New Literary History, Feminist Studies, Signs, MELUS, ARIEL, New Literatures Review, World Englishes, and American Studies International. Among her honors, Lim received the UCSB Faculty Research Lecture Award (2002), the Chair Professorship of English at the University of Hong Kong (1999 to 2001), University of Western Australia Distinguished Lecturer award, Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer award, and the J.T. Stewart Hedgebrook award. She has served as chair of Women’s Studies and is currently professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Newcastle Beach
(For Kerrie Coles and Brian Joyce)
At 6 a.m. I set off for the Pacific,
her heaving bosom stretched between
rival lovers gazing from opposite beaches.
Silicate, shell and stone roil beneath her touch,
back and forth, groaning, while she slips
away and toward, teases sun rising
and setting, and the surfer men come daily.
I also adore her, threaded to her fine
eyebrow horizons, changeful swells that raise
my thirst no matter how much I swallow.
I can never be a woman like her,
forever wet, incipiently
violent even when calmed. In Newcastle
young boys and older throw their bodies
passionately at her each morning,
naked male skin carried toward dark rock
and cars. By sides of streets they strip,
wriggle into work clothes, as day
collapses into schools, offices, coal-mines
and their women’s arms, awake and sullen
in the world of dry air. They are mermen,
stolen away from their mothers’ hips.
And I? Drawn early down to Bogie Hole,
treading the slippery convict-shattered
stone steps, descend to the maddened
slamming of her spittle against tumbled
boulders, gulp the white and yellow sprays
that break, withdraw and break, in digital
seconds never returning. Like our men
moving on to other bodies, while the Ocean
Woman breathes in, breathes out, breathes in,
cradling her surfers past danger and drowning.
=================================