"When I read poetry collections, I dog-ear the pages of the poems that strike me. When I finished The Carrying, it seemed like every other page was dog-eared. Limon is tenacious and brilliant."
Publisher Milkweed Editions
Publication Date 2018-08-14
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / Poetry / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Nathalie B.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9781571315120
“[Ada Limón’s] new collection is her best yet, a much needed shot of if not hope, then perseverance amidst much uncertainty.” —NPR
WINNER OF THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
ALA NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018
FINALIST FOR THE 2019 PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD
From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Ada Limón comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.
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.
