She is the new host of American Public Media’s weekday poetry podcast The Slowdown. Limón’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review, among others.
But the reward is a sense that friendship may still happen between reader and book, and that poetry need not be about the distances between us.Īda Limón is the author of The Hurting Kind, as well as five other collections of poems. Or froze over it was there because it had to be.įor readers who allow themselves to be invited into a world of herons, horses, Kentucky bluegrass, and yes, even kitchens, Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things offers a world where the coffee’s hella strong and, yes, some beer may even get spilled. To help us through the day: the great blue heron
They begin to lie to one another to fill this need for communion: An example of this is found in Limón’s poem “The Great Blue Heron of Dunbar Road.” The poem describes a ritual of daughter and stepfather who delight in seeing a blue heron while driving past a local pond to such an extent they’re disappointed on occasions when it’s not there. And sometimes story expands the scope of personhood by adding a dash of mythology. The advantage of the “I” of authorship is that it allows a personal touch absent in a more clinical brand of poetry. To see more sky than just this little squareīut then we’d miss Brooklyn, and each other, While elsewhere carrots are uprooted, the poem “Someplace like Montana” conveys the emotional toll of human uprooting through a bar conversation set in Brooklyn: There’s a trajectory to life expressed in the collection: from a semi-rural childhood home in Northern California to New York City to the poet’s adopted rural environs of Kentucky. The poem prefers the musculature of horses over manes braided with flowers: Right out of the gate, the collection’s first poem “How to Triumph like a Girl” argues for the unbridled expression of the human spirit. The poem expresses regret but also resistance to a life of passivity. The child, wanting to possess this beauty, rips out the immature crop and is scolded by her father. Limón writes: “When I was a kid, I was excited about carrots, / their spidery neon tops in the garden’s plot.” The phrase “bright dead things” comes from the collection’s poem “I Remember the Carrots.” If a mere book of poetry can invite the reader into the kitchen for coffee and a story, Limón’s new collection Bright Dead Things does just that.īright Dead Things explores the duality of joy and suffering. While some theories of poetry argue for silencing the “I” of authorship, Ada Limón’s brand of poetry is personal and emotionally honest. In life’s trajectory from childhood story hour to adult happy hour, good storytellers are in demand. Dave Seter’s review of “Bright Dead Things” by Ada Limón:
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