Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a 'huge beating genius machine' striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. ' Limón's poems are like fires: charring the page, but leaving a smoke that remains past the close of the book.' - The Millionsīright 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.'Ī book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact-tracing in intimate detail the various ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. These poems may not chronicle our hometown or our family, but Limón makes the book live within us too.The National Book Award finalist. There’s no way to oversell a book that has already received such praise, including recently being named a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, but even still, it must be noted how much the collection deserves the acclaim it’s gotten. In “Down Here,” she learns to translate the Kentuckian phrase “I hate it for you”: She marvels because “I am not that strong.” Because she can only wonder at how these women “stand the murderous fury.” Because, through it all, these women are “still singing.” Place has given them purpose, identity, and comfort, and it’s being gifted to her. In the coal muck for their blood-deep origin. They stand for the mountains they loved, rage Gallbladders full of black coal sludge, and still

The women of Appalachia are watchingĮach home poisoned by bad air, deadly water,

It’s in Kentucky, in the casual memories of, for example, “In a Mexican Restaurant I Recall How Much You Upset Me,” and in the love she has for her husband that speaker and poem find each other.ĭespite the isolation she often feels, the speaker discovers strength and connection within her new community. Reading Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things brings to mind a particular bit of wisdom from Richard Hugo: “The poem is always in your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another.” Though the book’s speaker is from Brooklyn, though she had a strained relationship with her stepmother, though she’s caught remembering her exes and fights with her husband over his, the poems resonate so deeply because of distance and time away from what was so familiar, so close.

Bright dead things limon