I like short books. It always strikes me how seductive, potent, and complete something can feel by virtue of what is excised, omitted. Of course, a short collection of poetry risks inadequacy. But a large, long collection risks turgidity. I especially admire volumes that strive to the economy and distillation to which lyric poems themselves conventionally aspire. Sandra Lim’s third book of poems, The Curious Thing, one of the finest books published this year, is a brisk one.

These poems display fierce concision. But we should be wary of using a descriptor like “austere” to situate them. Lim’s voice has always been more opulent than arctic, even if the speaker of her 2014 collection, The Wilderness, did trek through a wintry internal landscape. That book’s closing poem, cleverly titled “Cliffs,” arrived at an edge: “Words are afraid up here. / The rapture and the terrifying exposure.” Then: “Snow hurries to the meeting, wanting to cover the waking in my body. / I could fill up the sea with this waking.”

Such plangent music can risk inertness—or relentlessness. So it comes as a relief that the stated challenge of The Curious Thing, disclosed in its opening poem, “is to convey the supreme gaiety / of the heart.” The textures of daily life (sharing “bitter coffees on the terrace,” a bartender who “decants striped red straws / with their determined gaiety into a glass jar,” even “shopping bags and appointments”) keep these poems amorous and supple. Colloquial ease is never far: “You always forget,” writes Lim, “you’re a bag of blood.”

But such élan belies a seething intellect. “There is something attractive,” said Marianne Moore, “about a mind that moves in a straight line.” Reading these poems one capitulates to their ferocity of expression and precision of sentiment. In “Chanson Douce,” holding a newborn feels alien to the childless speaker, who is “anxious, supreme, and invaded / by longing,” and occasions a sobering memory of

a little
time ago, wishing I had something
new, and the strain of it
nearly killing me. There was
no deeper meaning.

Elsewhere, the sense of abandon described in the novels of Jean Rhys is licensed as a kind of ars poetica:

I hear you, Jean. Yours is a voice
disabused; and inside the cold of it,
there’s a sort of festival.

The word “festival” strikes one here almost like a profanity.

Three of the most exquisite poems in this collection each possess for a title the name of a different American city. Delivered in past tense, each poem limns youth’s obvious pleasures and anxieties—and, less obviously, youth’s ineluctable boredom. In “Chicago,” the speaker remembers mornings she

heard the train roar and go up
into the center of things. […]

I would take long walks and say to no one,
When I was first married…

Later, in “Boston,” she sets up a vividly drawn scene of emotional paralysis:

When I first moved to this city to take a job,
and the snows began to fall, a slow sadness took hold of me.

Someone left a tiny pencil drawing of a sailboat
on the ceiling of my bedroom, and I would stare up at it each night,

thinking that it would eventually stir.