How did you first come to writing poems? What is it about the form that resonates?
I encountered poetry for the first time, as many of us do, in school—by reading Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe and others. But I didn’t truly fall in love with the art form until I stumbled upon YouTube videos of spoken word poets performing their work. Through poets like Sarah Kay, Shane Koyczan and Rudy Francisco, I found poetry that I connected to, that felt like it echoed my own experiences; I realized that poetry could be evocative, emotional and funny.
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. I love how much work and effort and meaning can be poured into a line break, a punctuation choice, a single word. It is frustrating and hard and so rewarding in the end.
How has putting together your first book for publication changed your writing? What have the differences been since?
The writing process for this book really started with arrhythmia, my chapbook that came out with Rahila’s Ghost Press in 2022. Once that project was out in the world and I began to imagine what a full-length collection might look like, I started with themes in the chapbook that I wanted to explore further, including my book’s title poem, “Elegy for Opportunity.”
Once I identified those key themes—the intertwining forces of grief and love, anxiety about the climate crisis, pop culture touchstones that capture this specific moment in history—I began to fill write poems that filled in some of the gaps. My favourite part of this process was learning to think of each poem as a piece of the book-puzzle rather than as an individual entity. Many poems that occur later in the book were edited or written specifically to reference the poems that came before them, and I enjoyed the challenge of finding and creating those connections.
How does a poem begin?
For
me, there are two main ways a poem begins. One is through personal
experience—something happens to me, and I feel compelled to write about or
through that experience, whether it’s rewatching Inside Out, my first
time bouldering or a snowy trip to Ottawa.
The other way I stumble into poetry is through fun facts! You see this all throughout Elegy for Opportunity, and by that I mean it literally contains a poem titled “Fun Facts.” Our world is so weird and wonderful, and sometimes you’re on a Zoom call with a friend and she says, “Did you know poetry used to be in the Olympics?” and you look it up and it’s true, and poof, a poem is born.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I have a day job, and unfortunately I am not a wake-up-early-to-write kind of person, so writing often happens in my phone on the bus ride to work, or on my lunch break, or on weekend afternoons at any number of coffee shops in the neighborhood. I am grateful to have a 9 to 5 that pays the bills so that writing can remain a solely creative practice, but on the flip side, I sometimes don’t have as much time or energy to put into it as I would like.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
I’m on the editorial board of Canthius, which is currently on hiatus, but the journal has an incredible catalog of back issues that I recommend folks check out! Much love also to Room, which continues to put out incredible feminist work, Augur Magazine for dreamy speculative goodness, and of course, talking about strawberries all of the time, which ran some of my first published poems back in 2019. I’m very grateful to be in community with you.
Who
are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
Kyo Lee won the CBC Poetry Prize in 2023 and recently released her debut book, I Cut My Tongue on a Broken Country. It’s a stunning book—reading “can you be a poet & be happy?” was the most seen I’ve felt by a poem in a long time—and I am so excited to read her work for the rest of my life.
I would also be
remiss not to mention Natasha Ramoutar, who edited Elegy for Opportunity.
Her latest collection, Baby Cerberus, is an ode to dreamers and
nostalgia, to asking what keeps us here and finding reasons to stay. I love her
poetry and I am so grateful that I got to work with her on this book.
Natalie Lim (she/her) 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 Elegy for Opportunity, her debut book of poetry (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025), and a chapbook, arrhythmia (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022).
She has work in the third issue.