On June 10, 2018, NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity sent its final transmission to
Earth, consisting of two data points: 22 watt-hours of energy production from its
onboard solar array, and a record-high atmospheric opacity indicative of the dust
storm then blanketing Perseverance Valley. A tweet from journalist Jacob Margolis
“translated” these data as, “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.” Opportunity
had by this point set many records and vastly exceeded its mission specifications,
having survived sixty times longer and travelled forty-five times farther than initially
planned.
Natalie Lim takes the Little Rover That Could as a jump-off point for talking
about the technologically mediated, relational, human world, particularly as performed
by younger people operating in an app-driven, metropolitan environment.
As such, the book will be highly relatable for many readers, while offering others a
window into an umwelt that’s pivotal for this cultural moment.
“I’m doomscrolling Reddit, sleeping until noon, ordering in,” she confesses, but
“what can poetry do? at the end of the world, / the words don’t matter but I write
them anyway // while doomscrolling Reddit, sleeping until noon, ordering in.”
Many of the poems are ars poetica, grappling with the uses and value of poetry, and
of words that may or may not be poetry. “I give myself permission to write / about
the small things. a trip / to the ice rink. the bus ride home. / cherry blossoms in full
bloom. anything to feel / like I have anything at all to say.”
Lim expresses the tensions of living a singular, gendered, urbanized life in which
friendships, the availability of decent take-out food, and the question of one’s biological
clock loom as large as political crises in the news, or technological wonders
in space. “[T]he next morning, my local paper will report / the most impressive
scientific breakthrough / of the twenty-first century. I will flip past to the weather
// as I reach for a cup of coffee, reach again / … I will set humanity back a hundred
years / to keep Gong Gong’s baseball cap, the garden / overflowing with tomatoes,
my favourite barista / at the counter each morning.”
Lim’s tone is confessional, conversational, and disingenuous to a degree that can
feel awkward. This awkwardness is salutary, pushing the reader to confront aspects of self and other that might be experienced as cringe. Writing began, for many of us,
in teenage diaries or on social media. Poetry emerges from these roots and should
not be forced to divest itself of all traces of its personal origins in love letters, argumentative
texts, or self-castigating blog posts. In the delightfully titled poem “Oh, to
Be a Dog, Begging for a Piece of Chicken from the Instant Pot” she dances around
the kitchen with her sister, admits “… I’ll be honest, Amanda, sometimes I’m wrong
in my poems,” but concludes triumphantly: “I’m not wrong today. / I want this written
down, on the record, / passed down to our children and their children, / carved
into the annals of history / for aliens to find long after we have turned to dust: //
Blade Runner 2049 is, in fact, an extremely boring movie / and nothing you ever say
will convince me otherwise.”
