STELLAR - Palmer, Esther Lim

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Résumé :
The title of Esther Lim Palmer's second chapbook, Stellar, is a fitting one, as these poems call out brightly from the darkness that surrounds us and guide us like navigational stars. In a voice that is always urgent and intimate, Palmer writes beautifully of longing and mystery, be it the longing for migratory birds to return to a beloved body of water, or the mystery of our relationship to our own childhoods. In this disorienting time, it is so wonderful to read a poet who helps us understand better where we stand. Palmer never shies away from the truth, but nor does she leave us alone. Yes, she writes, there is sand here. But water too. It is in this nexus, between challenge and consolation, that the poems in Stellar do their vital work.-Austin Smith There is a dreamlike quality in the way the poems of Stellar summon reverie from the natural world. Esther Lim Palmer's language is rhythmic and reverential, engaging the reader with a quiet but profound sense of wonder. We witness egret wings forging through the fog-languid, lowering, lifting and the hum of bees in the hive of bliss. Each work is a portal to discovery, self-declaration, and renewal. The familiar is animated through desire and longing: broken streetlights flicker/with quivering lips for an orange moon; an innocent pleasure allows her [t]o let the sea [s]well/up and up, and bluff a lullaby. Hovering between the real and imagined landscape, Palmer's skill is like a sleight-of-hand, her poetry a subtle and lyrical vehicle for unexpected rewards. Her magic comes in as the wind leaves words outside the window/cracked open; words like invisible gifts.-Mindy Kronenberg

Biographie:
Esther Lim Palmer was born in Sydney, Australia. To fulfill her South Korean immigrant father's wishes, she studied law at the University of Sydney, and practiced in Big Law for over a decade in Sydney, Hong Kong, and California. She is the author of the chapbook Janus (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and her work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including California Quarterly, Plainsongs, White Wall Review, Westwind, Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus, Volume Two, The Hungry Chimera, Brief Wilderness, Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal, and Oberon's Seventeenth Annual Issue-selected to be archived in the EBSCO's Humanities' database for universities and cultural entities interested in contemporary literary work. She currently lives and writes in San Francisco.