Ada Limón writes poems of haunting that also operate as poems of joy. That this is not the paradox it seems may be what’s most exemplary about her work. Through six collections—Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, Sharks in the Rivers, Bright Dead Things, The Carrying, and The Hurting Kind—she has created a space that balances introspection and observation, identity and nature, the inner and the outer worlds. I think of “The Conditional,” first published in 2013, which begins, “Say tomorrow doesn’t come. / Say the moon becomes an icy pit. / Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified. / Say the sun’s a foul black tire fire,” and goes on to trace a litany of woes and missed opportunities before concluding, “Say, It doesn’t matter. Say, That would be / enough. Say you’d still want this: us alive, / right here, feeling lucky.” The poem possesses a vivid movement, not just in the emotions it encompasses, stretching from despair to acceptance, but also in the flow of language, those early single-sentence lines yielding to the more fluid breaks of the denouement.
“The Conditional” appears almost exactly in the center of Startlement: New and Selected Poems, which gathers 123 pieces, including 21 never before published in book form. To call this volume capacious would be an understatement; it represents a career overview, after all. And yet, unlike so many other such collections, Startlement is not a retrospective but rather a vehicle for considering Limón’s career anew. In part, this has to do with the new work, which in many ways picks up where 2022’s The Hurting Kind left off, exploring the nuances of a not-so-quiet desperation: “What if all I’ve done,” she writes in “Even Here It Is Happening,” “is guard / myself against despair?”
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.SUBSCRIBE
Limón is, of course, as celebrated as a poet can be in the United States. The nation’s 24th (and incumbent) poet laureate, she has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations; Bright Dead Things was a finalist for a 2015 National Book Award. Yet more memorable than any accolade is the texture of her writing, which exhibits an astonishing range and sensitivity. “On my way to the fertility clinic,” she begins “The Vulture & the Body,” “I pass five dead animals.” In “Joint Custody,” she writes, “Why did I never see it for what it was: / abundance? Two families, two different / kitchen tables, two sets of rules.” Here, as in “The Conditional,” she sees through or past what we might consider the expected outcome into a different, and difficult, symmetry. She is writing with eyes wide open, in other words, not to deliver a message but to address some necessary question, to puzzle out a matter of concern. Poetry as action, writing as an excavation, the line of words like a winding path on which the poet may discover something about herself. At the same time, Limón understands, resolution is at best a temporary solace in a world as fraught and fragile as the one in which we live.
The result is work in which form and function are inextricably connected, in which meaning derives from both the substance and the structure of the poem.•
Join us on November 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Limón will sit down with a special guest and host John Freeman to discuss Startlement: New and Selected Poems. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
