Ada Limón writes poems of haunting that also operate as poems of joy. That this is not a paradox may be what’s most exemplary about her work. Through six collections, she has created a space that balances introspection and observation, identity and nature, the inner and the outer worlds. I think of “The Conditional,” 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.
“The Conditional” appears almost in the center of Startlement: New and Selected Poems, which gathers 123 pieces, including 21 never before published in book form. To call the volume capacious would be an understatement; it represents a career overview, after all. And yet, 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 picks up where her most recent book, 2022’s The Hurting Kind, left off, exploring the nuances of a not-so-quiet desperation.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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An essential quality of Limón’s work is the texture of her writing, with its 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.
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.•
