Sphinxlike by Chime Lama

Chime Lama’s poems are formally, visually, and tonally adventurous, funny, dizzying, grand in scope and spare as needed. I admire Lama’s sense of the whole page as available, and her desire to play with every angle available to bend and space her lines, which are also often multi-lingual, and always direct, while constantly moving. Her instructions make me smile. Sphinxlike should be an open secret, passed among everyone to carry around and share and read anywhere.

–Anselm Berrigan, author of Pregrets

Every page of Chime Lama’s debut collection is abuzz with experimentation and playfulness. Among its many offerings are delightful words to be looked at and word-based drawings to be read. Hers are words in Tibetan script and English set free to chant and hum and prance and speak in riddles and wax poetic on these pages liberated from the grip of “English only” and the pressure to make linear sense. It’s the only poetic sense imaginable.

–Mónica de la Torre, author of Repetition Nineteen

This book makes me want to dance. It is not written so much as hurled.

–Sparrow, author of Small Happiness & Other Epiphanies