The Carrying: Poems
Ada LimónWINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
From National Book Award & 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 & 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 & 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, & 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 & deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.
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Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth US Poet Laureate & the author of The Hurting Kind, as well as five other collections of poems. These include The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award & was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, & Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, & the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limón is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, 4 her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, & American Poetry Review, among others. Born & raised in California, she now lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
AWARDS
U.S. Poet Laureate
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
National Book Award Finalist