Bøker av Ada Limon

The #1 bestselling new collection from National Book Award finalist Ada Limon are 'Exquisite poems about love, fertility, desire, this natural world we move through, the political climate, so much more' Roxane Gay

A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bright Dead Things examines the dangerous thrill of living in a world you must leave one day and the search to find something that is 'disorderly, and marvelous, and ours'.

The speaker in this extraordinary collection finds herself multiply dislocated: from her childhood in California, from her family's roots in Mexico, from a dying parent, from her prior self. The world is always in motion and it is also full of risk. In such a world, how should one proceed? Throughout Sharks in the Rivers, Limon suggests that we must cleave to the world as it "keep[s] opening before us," for, if we pay attention, we can be one with its complex, ephemeral, and beautiful strangeness. Loss is perpetual, and each person's mouth "is the same / mouth as everyone's, all trying to say the same thing." For Limon, it's the saying-individual and collective - that transforms each of us into "a wound overcome by wonder," that allows "the wind itself" to be our "own wild whisper."

As part of her tenure as US poet laureate, Ada Limón has written "In Praise of Mystery," which will be engraved on the Europa Clipper spacecraft that launches to Jupiter and its moons in October 2024. Published here as Limón's debut picture book, this luminous poem is illustrated by celebrated and internationally renowned artist Peter Sís.In Praise of Mystery celebrates humankind's endless curiosity, asks us what it means to explore beyond our known world, and shows how the unknown can reflect us back to ourselves.

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow Ada Limón.“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón. “I am the hurting kind.” What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others’ stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. “Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning’s shade,” writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”

"Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of fifty poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by our most celebrated writers"--

The poems in Lucky Wreck trace the excitement of plans and the necessary swerving detours we must take when those plans fail. Looking to shipwrecks on the television, road trips ending in traffic accidents, and homes that become sites of infestation, Ada Limón finds threads of hope amid an array of small tragedies and significant setbacks. Open, honest, and grounded, the poems in this collection seek answers to familiar questions and teach us ways to cope with the pain of many losses with earnestness and humor. Through the wrecks, these poems continue to offer assurance. This darkness is not the scary one, it's the one before the sun comes up, the one you can still breathe in. Celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Limón's award-winning debut, this edition includes a new introduction by the poet that reflects on the book and on how her writing practice has developed over time.