Natalie Lim's ​Elegy for Opportunity

Reviewed by Alex Carrigan

(Wolsak & Wynn, 2025)

Poetry in many ways is an attempt to remember feelings in the midst of all the visual and sensory details around us. It’s the poet’s desire to convey an experience and a thought in as few words as possible, while still trying to find new ways to express it. Because of the confessional nature of poetry, it is important for poets to think of what it is they want to put out into the world, and how much they are willing to release and to hold onto.

Natalie Lim’s Elegy for Opportunity (Wolsak & Wynn) is one such poetic archive. In this debut collection, Lim explores various small and large moments in what appears to be a relatively short period of her life. By anchoring the collection around one particular historical moment, her poems are confessions and recordings of experiences that held great meaning for her. By doing so, the collection feels like a true manifesto of her as a poet and as a person, with all the messiness and anxiety that come from both roles.

From the first piece in the collection, Lim is reckoning with her identity as a poet. Many of the poems are ars poetica pieces that confess to the struggles of writing poetry. With pieces like “Love Poems Don’t Win Contests” and “Pantoum on a Deadline,” she delivers some blunt truths about being a poet, writing “the most annoying thing a writer can do / is complain about writing” in the latter. However, the confessional nature of these poems doesn’t feel like lecturing, but more like she’s speaking about her experiences over a few drinks in a dimly lit bar.
​
This also feeds into the confessional nature of the collection. Aside from a few pieces, most of the poems in Elegy are written in free verse, as if Lim was quickly scribbling them down before she forgot about the thoughts she had. A number of pieces add to the feel by being titled after the day they were either about or when she wrote them. Because of this, the collection as a whole feels like a diary, and a lot of the humor and relatability comes from how frank Lim is allowing herself to be, such as in pieces with blunt titles like “So I Played 100 Hours of Video Games This Month” or “I’ve Started Running Half Marathons Like Everyone Else.”

​Throughout these confessions are a series of poems titled “Elegy for Opportunity.” These are poems written for the Opportunity robotic rover which was sent to Mars and left to power down once it was finished. Lim is attempting to connect with a being that cannot emote itself, writing lines like the following: 

​we knew she would die one day,
alone in a rusted sea,
but we are tender even
in our cruelty, so we
grieve. we write poems in her name.
our last message to her was a song.
a song – (Elegy for Opportunity)

The “Elegy” pieces in the collection are a chance for Lim to play with the nature of remembrance. Opportunity was a scientific marvel, but it was also a robot condemned to a solitary fate on a distant planet, so she examines this through poems like the second and third “Elegy” pieces, which look at fictional historical records of its creation. Each poem also speaks to Opportunity, asking it what it wants and feels: “…go explore and tell us what you see. / we’ll be there if we can. when we can. / the next time you hear from us, we’ll be singing” she writes in “Elegy for Opportunity III.”

Despite this heaviness, Lim does take the time to record some less serious moments in the collection, whether it’s about writing about a dachshund she saw in the park or her opinion about Blade Runner 2049. Many of these pieces are about relating to popular culture and how she experienced it, such a poems about Inside Out or Dungeons and Dragons. These do help ground the collection and ensure that Lim’s personality and preferences are conveyed through how she reacts to other beings and media around her. Some are about media like the Taylor Swift versions following her catalogue being purchased by Scooter Braun, while others are about small moments like cooking a chicken in an Instant Pot.
​
However Lim chooses to confess or record her experiences and thoughts, Elegy for Opportunity is a reminder that what should be held onto as time passes is empathy. The poetry asks the reader to empathize with robots and houseplants, but also asks them to remember the moments that incited these feelings. It’s a collection full of charm and openness that addresses the anxieties of modern life and shows how cathartic it is to let everything out onto the page.

---

​Alex Carrigan (he/him) is a Pushcart-nominated editor, poet, and critic from Alexandria, VA. He is the author of Now Let’s Get Brunch: A Collection of RuPaul’s Drag Race Twitter Poetry (Querencia Press, 2023) and May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He has appeared in The Broadkill Review, Sage Cigarettes, Barrelhouse, Fifth Wheel Press, Cutbow Quarterly, and more. Visit carriganak.wordpress.com or follow him on Twitter @carriganak for more info.