Walking Between Land and Water: the Pedestrian Poetics of Shirley Geok-lin Lim

"Walking between Land and Water" weaves an exploration of the tropes of walking and liminality in the poetry of Shirley Geok-lin Lim into an essay-portrait of the poet at her home in Santa Barbara. It tracks the poet as she takes her daily walk on the beach, and sees how this mundane act furnishes a mobile poetic that articulates the contradictions and complexities of her diasporic history and condition. Focussing on her most recent collection of poems, Walking Backwards, the essay also picks out the major shifts in her work, especially the change to a more transnational key.