This essay explores the poetry of Sandra Lim in The Wilderness and Loveliest Grotesque. Lim’s poetry shows a “gurlesque” aesthetic based in a feminist irreverence. “Errant wildness,” a term Lim uses of the colonial poet Edward Taylor, suggests a quality of gurlesqueness. This analysis first briefly suggests her location relative to the historical American wilderness and introduces her gurlesque challenges to masculinist American literature. Second, it considers how she can be located in sympathy with other American immigrant writers. Third, it investigates Lim’s linguistic errancy as it might be attributed to Lim as the child of immigrants. Fourth, it examines how her Korean background is distanced from her aesthetic via autobiographical uncertainty, countering common expectations for ethnic representation. Finally, it proposes that Lim’s work might be located in the “antinomian” tradition of American women’s writing as advanced by Susan Howe.
I. Introduction
II. Challenging Tradition
III. A Little Steinglish
IV. Immigrant Errancy
V. Autobiographical Uncertainty
VI. Antinomia
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