Visiting Writers' Series LibGuide: Ada Limón

"Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility--"What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?"--And a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: "Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal." And still Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. "Fine then, / I'll take it," she writes. "I'll take it all." In Bright Dead Things, Limón showed us a heart "giant with power, heavy with blood"--"the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it's going to come in first." In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full display--even as The Carrying continues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world."

""Bright Dead Things" examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately disorderly, and marvelous, and ours"-- Provided by publisher.

"Ada Limón is a poet of alchemy, able to transform herself into what is named as she utters the words—hummingbird, river, desire, gone. With Sharks in the Rivers she has created the thing itself, alternating rangy invocations with distilled wildness, always open to wonder." —Nick Flynn

"From the first lines of Lucky Wreck, I was drawn in by this smart, jaunty, musing, quirky voice, and as I read the whole book I felt more and more respect for Ada Limón's risky, haunting, wonderfully unexpected work. Like many of the best writers, she is funny and serious at the same time, the depths and heights are one: lucky wreck!" —Jean Valentine