Walking Backwards is about making a home when you are a nomad and adding an American self to the many selves that the world’s myriad, bewildering places throw at one body.
It is about how travel and restlessness wrench us and teach us about ourselves, how our losses compound our loves, and how endlessly absorbing the idea of home remains, particularly when we keep losing sight of it.
Orbiting the globe, the collection narrates encounters in a transnational American’s circuit. As much about Hong Kong as the west coast of the United States, it bundles transients and family, nature and city to produce a fresh, ethnically inflected poetics.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca, Malaysia. She has published five volumes of poetry including What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say (West End Press, 1998). She has also published three story collections, two novels and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces.
