“I’m not leaving / without you”: Forging Joy in Natalie Lim’s Elegy for Opportunity

Some books arrive in your life exactly when they are most needed. In our violent, turbulent world, reading Elegy for Opportunity by Natalie Lim was a necessary salve. This debut poetry collection is an important reminder that tenderness is a mode of resistance and survival in a culture that asks us to ignore atrocities. It is within this space that Lim uses poetic practice to forge a joy that feels particularly urgent, a joy that brings us into community as we continue to work against forces that isolate and oppress.

Elegy for Opportunity is centred around poems that address NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover–B, also known as Opportunity, and a series of love poems that track a relationship from its beginning. Throughout, Lim engages with pop culture, offering poems that feature the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie featuring Kiera Knightley, Taylor Swift, Dungeons and Dragons, absurd Spotify-generated playlist titles, Pixar’s 2015 Inside Out, and the concepts of “girl dinner” and “girl math.” Lim’s writing is conversational and funny, yet her musical language builds to striking turns by the end of each poem, allowing for moments of deeply felt insight. The ending of “Fun Facts” showcases this breadth of style:

you are busy telling me
about the dinosaurs at the museum
…
the T. Rex might have had feathers, you say
early ones called microfilaments.
I consider that beast, all myth and muscle,
burgeoning wings just catching the breeze.
…
deep in its DNA,
in its heart of giant hearts,
it knew—it must have—
that it was born to fly.

Despite Lim’s often colloquial, humorous tone, the book doesn’t shy away from the realities we’re living through. Lim references the ongoing genocide in Palestine directly, including in an explanation in the notes section that the line “40,000 dead in Gaza” from “Elegy for Opportunity V” was updated several times, “with substantial and horrifying increases.” “By the time you read this it will be out of date,” she writes. “Free Palestine, now and always.” As genocide is perpetrated in Palestine, as climate disaster and late-stage capitalism escalate, as fascist movements gain power, the poems question what it could look like to build a world worth living in. How can we, as Lim asks in “On Bouldering,” “see the right path up”? “Maybe,” she continues, “there is no right path, but together we’ll find one that feels possible … reaching high—higher!—towards a future not quite in view.”

As genocide is perpetrated in Palestine, as climate disaster and late-stage capitalism escalate, as fascist movements gain power, the poems question what it could look like to build a world worth living in.

Lim’s work looks for new ways of living and being together that disrupt our current status quo. In the poems, it becomes clear that our relationships with each other are essential to any possible path forward. This sense of community feels particularly strong in the many epistolary poems that run throughout Elegy for Opportunity. From the final three poems in the pillar series about the Mars Rover, to the love poems, to those written to the speaker’s friends or sister, these direct addresses lend the collection a warmth and honesty that builds a feeling of intimacy. In using the epistolary form, Lim positions the speaker in relation to others, centring relationships rather than the lone poet’s experience of the world.

In some poems, Lim addresses the reader directly using second person narration. In “I Tour You Up East Hastings, from Nanaimo” the speaker seems to narrate directly to the reader, creating the feeling of a shared experience as she describes ordinary details:

sooo that’s my little garden suite—we don’t get a lot of light, but at least it stays cool in the summer and the landlord is nice and we finally got rid of the spiders … when I first moved here, It’s Okay was this vegan place called Bad Apple and I recommended their waffle fries to anyone who would listen.

This perspective places the speaker in conversation with readers, creating a sense of connection in what is the typically isolated experience of reading and writing.

The act of building community is also woven into the text through the way Lim uses a robust citational practice to situate her work within a lineage of writers that extend beyond the scope of the book itself. In “Six Months and Counting,” Lim borrows the line “they say there are still good people in this world” from fellow Chinese-Canadian poet Isabella Wang’s poem “Late,” and continues: “I wonder if I am one of them, / balled-fist hands, echo-chamber brain / heart brimming over with want and want and want.” Other lines from Canadian poets including Natasha Ramoutar, Manahil Bandukwala, and Terrence Abrahams are threaded through the collection, a choice that pulls her contemporaries closer.

Being in conversation with other poets and foraging language from unexpected places exposes the web of relations that is always present, even if we’re not always paying attention.

Lim also brings in found language: lines from the Jasper National Park and Parks Canada websites, texts from her sister, a marketing agency blog post. In “17 Inspiring Brand Manifestos as Compiled by Chris Getman,” she scrambles the language of the listicle, taking up the phrasing of capitalist marketing to create her own manifesto for living:

we are creatives.
we imagine
and know not how to stop.
it feels good to do work and not expect anything in return.
work is not a job. work is your love made visible.
we believe in love.

These poems illustrate how the words we use can shape the way we see the world and that we, along with the art we create, are inseparable from the conditions of our lives. Being in conversation with other poets and foraging language from unexpected places exposes the web of relations that is always present, even if we’re not always paying attention.

In the five poems dedicated to the Mars Rover, the speaker sometimes approaches Opportunity like an old friend, and at others takes a wider lens to interrogate the imperialist impulses that underpin the colonization of our solar system. In the first of the series, “Elegy for Opportunity,” Lim writes:

we knew she would die one day,
alone in a rusted sea,
but we are tender even
in our cruelty, so we
grieve
…
there is nothing lonelier
than the little Mars rover
…
nothing lonelier than us,
creating things
we will sing to sleep one day 

Lim explores the human capacity to create, and be brutal, in an impossibly large, vacuous universe, and questions whether what we leave behind matters at all.

Lim also interrogates poetry’s ability to create change in a world that is characterized by loneliness and suffering. In “Pantoum on a Deadline” she writes:

people are dying out there and I am doing nothing—
I’m doomscrolling on Reddit, sleeping until noon, ordering in.
what can poetry do? at the end of the world,
the words don’t matter but I write them anyway.

These lines capture the hopelessness felt by many as horrifying events unfold at a blinding pace.

Yet throughout the book, the need to create art, whether an artist can see the tangible difference it makes, is positioned as a means of and reason for survival. “Elegy for Opportunity III” illuminates this complicated feeling: “we made so many beautiful things to ease the strangeness of being in these bodies. I want to believe they survived. that they mattered.” Existence makes creation a necessity, and understanding our experience becomes a balm that can soothe what is left by the friction of being alive. “Winter in Ottawa” suggests that there is an essential optimism inherent to the act of creating that cannot be crushed, that resists and remains: “they tell me / not to worry, that poetry is happening / in the background, all the time.” Even in the speaker’s darkest moments, it is poetry that makes being here worth it, that makes survival possible.

The speaker finds hope in the life-affirming moments of connection and community that persist: people doing what they can, holding each other close, sharing art, working toward a more sustainable, if imperfect, future.

In “Elegy for Opportunity V,” Lim captures the paradox of making art, in that it feels both futile and intrinsically necessary:

I write poetry
because I need someone to tell me
that it’s going to be okay.
even if that somebody is
me.
even if I’m lying through my teeth. 

This contradiction fuels the collection: “I try to do / the small things I can, for myself and the world,” Lim writes, even though “all of it feels like a failure, but I don’t know what else / there is to do. I don’t know what else there is.” The speaker finds hope in the life-affirming moments of connection and community that persist: people doing what they can, holding each other close, sharing art, working toward a more sustainable, if imperfect, future.

Elegy for Opportunity often feels like being in conversation with a dear friend. The poems are rich with hope and joy, such as when the speaker gives their dog a scrap of warm chicken, or blasts “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler on a camping trip with friends, or sees their mother in the garden on a sunlit morning. But this intimacy and delight doesn’t shirk responsibility or avoid what is difficult for the sake of what is easy. The collection looks at despair and refuses to be swallowed by it. These poems hold the difficult and from it pry open a space to breathe. And there, the air is sweet.