In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.
Shirley Geok-lin LimI had a couple of Asian readers and other folks tell me, "Oh, you have a lot of sex in your writing."
Shirley Geok-lin LimThe judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited with approval and with no apparent conscious irony my early poem, "No Alarms." The poem was composed probably sometime in 1974 or 1975, and it complained about the impossibility of writing poetry - of being a poet - under the conditions in which I was living then.
Shirley Geok-lin LimI don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim