Stellar

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 SmithThere 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