Elegy for Opportunity
Natalie Lim
April 8, 2025
96 PAGES | ISBN 978-1-998408-15-3
In her debut collection, Natalie Lim asks: How do we go on living and loving in a time of overlapping crises? Anchored by elegies for NASA’s Opportunity rover and a series of love poems, this collection explores the tension and beauty of a world marked by grief through meditations on Dungeons & Dragons, Taylor Swift’s cultural impact, the all-engulfing anxiety of the climate crisis and more. Confessional, funny and bursting with joy, Elegy for Opportunity extends a lifeline from Earth that will leave you feeling comforted, challenged and a little less alone in the universe.
Advance Praise
“Urgent, arresting and gorgeously sincere, Natalie Lim’s Elegy for Opportunity is the shining debut of a rising star who is sure to make her mark in Canadian poetry and beyond. In highly accessible yet beautiful language, Lim’s poems dive fearlessly into the great questions of what it means to be young, alive and in search of truth and beauty in a world marked by violence and displacement. Lim showcases remarkable technical talent and emotional range, dancing effortlessly between deeply intimate moments and global issues, while also weaving in meditations on form, pop culture and politics. From the very first page, this book offers both challenge and comfort, sweetness and sorrow, seriousness and laughter. Readers will fall in love over and over again.”
– Kai Cheng Thom, author of Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls and I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World
“Elegy for Opportunity moors the reader in the small moments we sometimes all forget to pause in – the enjoyment of saying ‘our’ with the person you love, tenderly feeding the dog roasted chicken from your plate or sitting outside with your chosen family by moonlight. Haunting and heavenly as a ballad belted among close friends in an SUV, these poems impart a crucial and generous lens into acts of tenderness, belonging and the science of holding on.”
– Mallory Tater, author of The Birth Yard and This Will Be Good
“In Elegy for Opportunity, Natalie Lim does something I never would have expected: she fills my heart. The poems in this collection are charming and colloquial, affectionate and anxious, and, most importantly, speak directly to the soft beast inside each of us that ferociously holds on to love. Elegy for Opportunity is a book for the darkest of winter nights, for those long afternoons when our brains will not stop buzzing, for friends to share as they come across lines that resonate. Beautiful, wise and full of empathy.”
– Jen Sookfong Lee, author of Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart and The Shadow List
Reviews
Disclosure & Human Connectedness: A Review of Natalie Lim’s Elegy for Opportunity (Wolsak & Wynn Spring 2025) (Chris Banks, The Woodlot, 16/04/2025)
"The best poems in this collection are rich, multi-layered, and are what poetic communion–the subtle art of the emotional whisper, that bond or transference between poet and reader–is all about."
Elegy for Opportunity: Natalie Lim’s debut collection explores collective grief (becky tu, Pancouver, 07/04/2025)
"The collection is a testament to that soft ache of the human condition, from the unspoken fears to the clinging of hope. Each line carries empathy for not only the speaker of the poem but for all the readers, too."
★ Elegy for Opportunity (Molly Cross-Blanchard, Quill & Quire, April 2025)
"I recognize my own experience in her crisis at trying to hold two incompatible realities at once – one in which we aren’t worth saving from the disasters of our own making, another that bears every good and beautiful thing we’ve ever done."
Pearl Pirie: Elegy for Opportunity, by Natalie Lim (Pearl Pirie, periodicities, 04/03/2025)
"Whereas Opportunity sent back over a 1000 reports, Lim shares 44 poems with a connecting thread of the little rover that could, an anchoring key. The rover is emblematic of the planet itself with time available ticking away. The rover acts as a counterpoint to our option on earth to build each other up instead of being cut-off from both good and bad. She sets her mind to sorting what is worth keeping, small not-ornamental beauties but moments that make people worth saving."
Interviews
Why I Wrote This Book Issue #44 — MORE Poetry!! (The Miramichi Reader, 13/04/2025)
"I have spent a lot of time over the past few years—as I think many young people have—trying to reconcile the joys of my everyday life with the feeling that our world is hurtling towards certain doom."
Natalie Lim on her debut poetry collection "Elegy for Opportunity" (Margaret Gallagher, North by Northwest, 12/04/2025)
How do we go on living and loving in a time of overlapping crises? Vancouver writer and 2018 CBC Poetry Prize winner Natalie Lim explores that question in her debut collection "Elegy for Opportunity," as we continue our April poetry series.
The art of writing #114 : Natalie Lim (Malcolm Curtis, talking about strawberries all of the time, 09/04/2025)
"For me, what resonates about poetry is the challenge of communicating complex ideas in as few words as possible. I love playing with imagery, turning a metaphor this way and that until it finally clicks into place."
Articles
39 Canadian poetry collections coming out in spring 2025 (CBC Books, 08/04/2025)
Wonderful to see Natalie's collection on this list!
What We're Reading: Staff Writers' Picks, Spring 2025 (Hamilton Review of Books, 24/03/2025)
It's wonderful to see Natalie Lim on this great list from the HRB.
I know so much more about tenderness than I used to. (Natalie Lim, Send My Love to Anyone, 22/03/2025)
Natalie shares an excerpt from her new collection.
Books for World Poetry Day (All Lit Up, 21/03/2025)
It's wonderful to see Natalie's book on this great All Lit Up list for World Poetry Day.
Powerful Canadian spring poetry releases (Sheelagh Caygill, On Creative Writing, 08/03/2025)
Natalie's collection is included in this wonderful roundup.
Most Anticipated: Our 2025 Spring Poetry Preview (49th Shelf, 06/03/2025)
Great to see Natalie's collection on this list.
2025 Spring Preview: Short Fiction and Poetry (Cassandra Drudi and Attila Berki, Quill & Quire, 15/01/2025)
We're delighted to see that Natalie Lim's fabulous new collection Elegy for Opportunity made the Quill & Quire's Spring Preview!
About the Author
Natalie Lim is a Chinese-Canadian poet living on the unceded, traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples (Vancouver, BC). She is the winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and Room magazine’s 2020 Emerging Writer Award, with work published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2020 and elsewhere. She is the author of a chapbook, arrhythmia (Rahila's Ghost Press, 2022).