Startlement: New and Selected Poems

by Ada Limon

“Startlement is a book of rare treasures. With lyrical mastery and intimate storytelling, Limón’s poetry reveals new ways of paying attention. This powerful collection is a gift.”—Amy Tan

An essential collection spanning nearly twenty years of emphatic, fearlessly original poetry from one of America’s most celebrated living writers.

Drawing from six previously published books—including widely acclaimed collections The Hurting Kind, The Carrying, and Bright Dead Things—as well as vibrant new work,  Startlement exalts the mysterious. With a tender curiosity, Ada Limón wades into potent unknowns—the strangeness of our brief human lives, the ever-changing nature of the universe—and emerges each time with new revelations about our place in the world.

Both a lush overview of her work and a powerful narrative of a poet’s life, this curation embodies Limón’s capacity for “deep attention,” her “power to open us up to the wonder and awe that the world still inspires” (The New York Times). From the chaos of youthful desire, to the waxing of love and loss, to the precarity of our environment, to the stars and beyond, Limón’s poetry bears witness to the arc of all we know with patient lyricism and humble wonder.

“A poet of ecstatic revelation” (Tracy K. Smith), Limón encourages us to meet our shared futures with open and hungry hearts, assuring “What we are becoming, we are / becoming together.”

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

204 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 30, 2025

About the author

Ada Limón is the author of three books of poetry, Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from New York University. Limón has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and was one of the judges for the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry. She works as a creative writing instructor and a freelance writer while splitting her time between Lexington, Kentucky and Sonoma, California (with a great deal of New York in between). Her new book of poems, Bright Dead Things is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2015.

Reviews

[Amy Imogene Reads]

Limon is an indescribable talent. I really enjoyed revisiting poems from earlier collections and experiencing her new ones.

[Book Riot Community]

This is one of Book Riot’s Best Books of 2025:

Pulling from Limón’s six published collections, these gorgeous poems unfold in chronological order from Lucky Wreck to The Hurting Kind. Having read every in-print title by the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate, I found myself electric with excitement to behold some of the prolific author’s new and new-to-me work. Revisiting familiar poems fed my bookish heart in myriad ways, and reading pieces from This Big Fake World and the final section for the first time is precisely why I open books—to connect, to learn, to feel awe. If you need a gift for yourself and for others, look into this exploration of dreams, grief, love, the ordinary, and the extraordinary.

- Connie Pan

[reading is my hustle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once, I thought
if I knew all the words
I would say the right thing
in the right way,
instead language becomes
more brutish…

[Natalie Snyder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another masterpiece. I’m in awe of Ada Limon and will forever read anything she writes.

[Dipali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect. No notes.

[Lea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love the new poems here.

[Dree · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first Limon, this is an anthology that also has new poems.

Many of these focus on nature, aging/life/growing up and recognizing what your parents did for you, stages of life. My favorite of them all was The Raincoat, but I also loved During the Impossible Age of Everyone, The Endlessness, and Startlement.

The Raincoast is about the writer realizing, as she sees a mom on the street give her own raincoat to her daughter, what all the doctor's visits and driving and PT she herself had as a kid--she took it for granted, the singing in the car with her mom. She never thought what her mother gave up to be there.

[Natalia · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful beautiful beautiful!!!!!!

[Tyrah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was excited to receive an advanced copy of Startlement through a goodreads giveaway. I finished just in time for it to be released next week On September 30. I really enjoy poetry and this did not disappoint. This was my first introduction to Ada, so I did not really know what to expect. It was nice to read some of her work in addition to some new poems. I appreciate the various themes of the poems, especially those relating to nature.

[L]

A master poet, but this did not flow for me.

[Lynn Gambardella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this! Such beautiful and descriptive writing! Need to read more poetry by Ada Limón. And more poetry in general!

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

How was I supposed to feel then? About
moving in the world? How could I touch anything
or anyone without the weight of all of time shifting
through us? I was not, or I did not think I was, making
up stories; it was how the world was, or rather it is how
the world is. I've only now become better at pretending
that there are edges, boundaries, that if I touch
something it cannot always touch me back.
Ada Limón, from her new poem THE ENDLESSNESS

Of all the reasons for gladness, what could be foremost of this one, that the mind can seize both the instant and the memory! But here’s the kingdom we call remembrance with its thousand iron doors through which I pass so easily, switching on the old lights as I go— while the dead wind rises and the old rapture rewinds, the stiff waters once more begin to kick and flow. Mary Oliver, from WINTER AT HERRING COVE

The Mojave and Latinx queer poet Natalie Diaz writes in her introduction to the new compilation of Mary Oliver’s work: "Little alleluias, she called her writings. Not meant to define but to praise, to rejoice in the maker and what has been made, to dare be heard as a whisper or a shout in this immense world. Oliver’s call to make a new and serious response resounds with June Jordan’s belief that, Poetry means taking control of the / language of your life. In Oliver’s poems, seeing is also feeling and both become an overwhelm for which language is a slight anodyne or ease.”

I love her inclusion of June Jordan’s line about poetry infusing the daily words of your life. It is true. It is freeing. It makes sure you are never bored or alone, since it runs through your mind at all times, magicfying the most mundane of days or most sorrowful. I am so desperately sorry for those who don’t feel anything with poetry or poetic writing. I see them in my mind staring at the big and small screens of their life barely blinking or breathing, certainly not living a rich, full, varied life. I read Ada Limón’s new compilation Startlement and Little Alleluias at the same time, feeling the holiness of this moment, that I am alive when these two were published.

Limón writes in an article for Alta, “I write to remember because not only do I want to hold on to this life, to everything I love, but I want to behold it, wholly. Writing is a way of saying, Yes, I am here, but also we are here together, all of us, how rare, how miraculous, how awful, how utterly strange.” Beholding is a prayer, and alleluias are praise, and while there are such differences in experience, age, setting, and tone, these two books show the glory and mystery and harshness of being alive. It is asked in times of suffering, how do we sing, how do we smile, how do we go on? The two poets begin to answer that question, and they do it over and over again.

The first works I resonated with in both books were Mary Oliver’s FLARE, from 2000 and Ada Limón’s A LITTLE DISTANTLY, AS ONE SHOULD, from 2005. I feel the closeness of that separation, just 5 years, and they both speak to me so clearly. I hope they forgive me, but I will shorten their names to Ada and Mary O for the rest of the review. Ada’s tone in this book of poems, which I hadn’t read before, is the frank, open, modern autobiographical style that may or may not be true to her life but is very engaging and accessible. Storytelling in its perfection. She is writing about how storytelling can be more powerful at times than the events that happened, all the details you can put in that may not have occurred to you as it was happening and her exuberance can shine through. She writes:

My friend, all the time, says I'm so excited,
and when I ask her, for what, she just shrugs
and says, Aren't you? I suppose so. Yes.

It’s the happiness for no reason, just because. The joy that accompanies the most quiet of things. I know so many people, including me, struggle with this, that fear, anxiety, depression, worry, stress mutes all those things out, but I have learned it is a practice, and with practice becomes easier. Mary O writes in FLARE, which opens with acknowledging the despicable abuse she suffered from her parents, but also singing that she won’t carry the “iron thing they carried:”

Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also, like the diligent leaves. A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life. Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away. Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance. In the glare of your mind, be modest. And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.

Another poem that compares is THE ECHO SOUNDER BY by Ada and WORK by Mary O, where they are both struggling with what to believe in when the world can be so dark. Both poems have a declaration of a belief in god, Ada here:

She understands now that bodies can swing
from trees and whole families can be
locked up, that people die the way fish do
starving sometimes, gutted and tortured
by children who think they are being
scientific and responsible. She thinks God
must know this and therefore he is ugly.
She decides God is no good, but he must exist,
he must exist so she can hold him accountable.
She decides this and then forgets.

Mary O here:
Everyday—I have work to do: I feel my body rising through the water not much more than a leaf; and I feel like the child, crazed by beauty or filled to bursting with woe; and I am the snail in the universe of the leaves trudging upward; and I am the pale lily who believes in God, though she has no word for it…

Ada is exploring the idea of an echo sounder, used in oceanography exploration, and the correlation with how an echocardiogram is an exploration of the chambers of the heart, of which we have 4, left and right atrium, left and right ventricles, chambers meaning cavities, empty areas, spaces that contain our blood in a rhythm, passed in from the body through one half, then to the lungs, back to the other side of the heart, and then to the body again. Blood is like water, water that circulates the earth through the water cycle, clouds, ground, rivers, creeks, lakes, oceans.

Mary O writes,
This is the habit of the rock in the river, over which the water pours all night and all day. But the nature of man is not the nature of silence. Words are the thunders of the mind. Words are the refinement of the flesh. Words are the responses to the thousand curvaceous moments—   we just manage it—   sweet and electric, words flow from the brain   and out the gate of the mouth.

I will sing for the veil that never lifts. I will sing for the veil that begins, once in a lifetime, maybe, to lift. I will sing for the rent in the veil. I will sing for what is in front of the veil, the floating light. I will sing for what is behind the veil—light, light, and more light.

Ada writes about learning a beautiful word Philadelphia and using that as a code or short hand for the feeling that Mary O writes about, illumination and its song:

She is convinced that she can talk
to God and she asks him a question.
She does not get an answer, so
she makes one up. She believes the answer is:
everything stops, the food is in the mouth, .
but the mouth is not there,
the water flows, but there is no creek.
…
like the way everything can
touch you at once
…
the feeling when all those things get to you
and you want to cry or pray and because
you’re no good at either, you
tell everyone to leave you alone so you
can go on feeling the world climbing around
in your body like you were just as much
a part of it as it was of you, maybe, she thought,
she could call that feeling Philadelphia.

Both ways, either way, it is song that we are so fortunate to be alive to read right now, and if we were alive in 2000 and 2005, to be alive when written.

There are so many connections through time and space. One of my favorite lines from Ada is from From SHARKS IN THE RIVERS title poem from 2010:
I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes,
I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.
Mary O’s door reference, also from FLARE,

But the poem wants to flower, like a flower. It knows that much. It wants to open itself, like the doorof a little temple, so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed, and less yourself than part of everything.

Or a leaf simultaneously falling from a tree and travelling the cosmos, ways the poets see the object differently, but inhabit the same corner of my mind:

and will you find yourself finally wanting to forget all enclosures, including the enclosure of yourself, o lonelyleaf, and will you dash finally, frantically, to the windows and haul them open and lean out to the dark, silvered sky, to everything that is beyond capture, shouting I’m here, I’m here! Now, now, now, now, now. From Mary O’s THE BOOK OF TIME


From Ada’s IN PRAISE OF MYSTERY: A POEM FOR EUROPA, written for the space flight where my name was inscribed:
there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.
We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.
And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,
each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.

Ada uses the word mountain 17 times, and Mary O only 6 but there is a connection from looking at the microcosm to the macrocosm, which is one of my favorite exercises.

Mary O, speaking of a small rock that was once a mountain in STONES, so that the stone holds the image of a grand place of worship, as well as the future potential of natural cathedrals like the Maroon Bells:

The white stones were mountains, then they went traveling. The pink stones also were part of a mountain before the glacier’s tongue gathered them up. Now they lie resting under the waves…Each one is a tiny church, locked up tight.

Ada writing in LET LOOSE (my favorite new Ada poem!!!) about becoming part of a mountain in a sacred way, intangible and protected, like the stones at the bottom of the ocean.

...watch each part
of me released and become something entirely
acrobatic and weightless, not flying, but not falling
just entirely in love with the air, oh look at how
gorgeous I am! Falling away from myself, no body
at all, just the mountain, just the breath
of the mountain, no not even the breath
of the mountain, nothing that can be hurt, or taken,
nothing that can be broken into or scarred,
something invisible and just how I imagined.

or in the Ada’s GEOGRAPHY OF MOUNTAINS, about going home to her hometown and childhood home, mountains and woman as the source of everything:

After all these years, I am waking up.
After all these years, I’ve come home, to the valley,
And now I know well the mountains that looks
Like a woman sleeping. I can point at her curves.
I know also that all mountains
Are women sleeping, dissolving imperceptibly,
Stretched out at last, alone, at rest,
The source of everything.

Back to Mary O in a prose section where she is celebrating staying in one place to learn it in quiet, receptive moments, so actually the absence of a mountain:

My story contains neither a mountain, nor a canyon, nor a blizzard, nor hail, nor spike of wind striking the earth and lifting whatever is in its path. I think the rare and wonderful awareness I felt would not have arrived in any such busy hour…Yet I would hazard this guess, that it is more likely to happen to someone attentively entering the quiet moment, when the sun-soaked world is gliding on under the blessings of blue sky, and the wind god is asleep. Then, if ever, we may peek under the veil of all appearances and partialities. We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions-even to a certainty- as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee's wings. This, too, I suggest, is weather, and worthy of report.

Ada coins a term, “breaknecking,” about a speeding truck, and Mary O creates a term, “mindroaming,” which at first seem unrelated, a truck and a river, but it shimmers in my mind as compatible, there is daydreaming in a slow, lazy fashion but if you need the mystery and delight, it also can come, sometimes must come at a breakneck speed to fight the darknesses of the world:

And then, thinking of those bodies of water, I go mindroaming. I could name a hundred events, hours, creatures, that have filled me with delight, and fructifying praise. Experience, experience!-with the rain, and the trees, and all their kindred- has brought me a comfort and a modesty and a devotion to inclusiveness that I would not give up for all the gold in all the mountains of the world. This I knew, as I grew from simple delight toward thought and into conviction: such beauty as the earth offers must hold great meaning.

There are dozens more, and I hope that if anyone else out there reads both, does a deep reading exercise and finds the threads that weave and bind and separate both poets, my sheroes, who illuminate the way in these times.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was SO EXCITED to receive an uncorrected proof from the publisher because I've seen many snatches of Limón's poetry quoted and Nearly All Of Them have resonated, but I never know where to start with poetry. Turns out! This volume is perfect!! Like the subtitle declares, it's got both new poems (in the section titled "Startlement"), but it also contains selections from eight of her other books: LUCKY WRECK, THIS BIG FAKE WORLD, SHARKS IN THE RIVERS, BRIGHT DEAD THINGS, THE CARRYING, and THE HURTING KIND. Perfect sampler pack, I loved it--it felt like the highlight reel of her other work.

I also really enjoyed far more of these than I expected to, going in. Frequently I find poetry opaque and taxing (I've always been a prose person), but I was pleasantly surprised by how approachable and down to earth most of these were. I didn't get all of them, of course (c'mon: it's still poetry), but I flagged nine as absolute favorites and a dozen others as "definitely revisit," which is a lot for me. And there were a bunch where I wanted to tear the poem out of the book, tie it up with a ribbon, and slip it into assorted friends' hands or pockets when they weren't looking so they could have it when they needed it. Absolutely phenomenal collection. If you, too, have been considering checking out Limón's work, start here!

[Lavelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

big heart ache

[Roger DeBlanck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Startlement marks Ada Limón’s first collection since her prestigious appointment ended as Poet Laureate of the United States. This formidable volume encompasses selections from each of her previous six books and it includes a final section that gathers sixteen new poems.

The pieces from her first two books demonstrate her experimentation with structure and her voice searching for how to address life’s conundrums. Then, with the pieces selected from her next four books, she showcases the fruition of her journey with one great poem after another.

Limón’s work keeps us curious and humble with how she identifies the hardships of loneliness and grief one second and celebrates the hopeful mystery and magic of our existence the next. Always lucid with candor, she confesses perils of the body and the challenges of love.

She often expresses indignation at the unfairness and cruelness of tragedy, and she knows the workings of memory can never entirely erase images from the mind. But she is always the hopeful visionary honoring what has departed and recognizing what remains.

Here are some of the memorable verses I marked throughout Startlement:

In “Marketing Life for Those of Us Left” she shares with us a humbling observation: “A friend says the best way to love the world is to think of leaving. // We’re all in trouble, you know? / Piles of empty stars we’ve tossed aside for the immediate kiss.”

In “To the Busted Among Us” she reminds us of life’s dilemmas: “I say to a stranger, I am harmless. // But the word doesn’t seem right. I have been harmed, / but I do not wish to do harm, but I could do harm. / (I am not without desire.)”

In “What it Looks Like to Us and the Words We Use” she muses with a touch of humor about the unknowable: “J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said, / No. I believe in this connection we all have / to nature, to each other, to the universe. / And she said, Yeah, God.”

In “The Leash” she laments our personal human struggles: “Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward / the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love / from the speeding passage of time.”

In “Dead Stars” she wills for us to be more than we are: “Look, we are not unspectacular things. / We’ve come this far, survived this much. What // would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?”

In “The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual” she identifies the difficulty the world presents to each of us: “Will you tell us stories that make / us uncomfortable, but not complicit?”

In “Calling Things What They Are” she confesses her innermost woes: “Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny I called it love and the whole time it was pain.”

In “Heart on Fire” she baffles over contradictions: “Who would have told you / life was a series of warnings, but also magic.”

In “The Hurting Kind” she yearns for more: “I see the tree above the grave and think, I’m wearing // my heart on my leaves. My heart on my leaves. // Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?”

In “The Origin Revisited” she questions the ability of language to define us: “All words become wrong. A whole world exists / without us. But who is us?”

[charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

big big day for horse gays, bird gays, and fish gays alike

[Bernie Gourley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a Greatest Hits from six of author's previous collections, plus twenty-one new poems. The poems are clever, personal, and often whimsical. They range from short to intermediate length and employ varied approaches to free verse poetry (plus a few prose poems.)

This was my first time reading Limón's work, and I enjoyed her poems tremendously. I'd highly recommend this book for poetry readers.

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here I will share a blog post I did on this poet's visit to Houston from my blog, Readerbuzz.



Ada Limón begins her night at Inprint Houston with a reading from her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind. She tells us before she begins that she will read ten poems. We can count down, she says, if we wish. We laugh.

She reads her ten poems (Or does she? Is anyone really counting?) She shares poems about moments, the moment her grandfather caught on fire, a moment of connection through sports, a moment with a groundhog that she tells us about in "Give Me This:"

"...A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering...Instead
I watch the groundhog more closely and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive."

Limón stretches out moments from the life and death of her grandfather in her title poem, "The Hurting Kind:"

"...Before my grandfather died, I asked him what sort
of horse he had growing up. He said,
Just a horse. My horse, with such tenderness it
rubbed the bones in my ribs all wrong.
I have always been too sensitive, a weeper
from a long line of weepers.
I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof..."

Lovely, lovely poems. Limón is a master of moments.

Sometimes great writers can put the words down beautifully on the page but fumble when speaking in public. Not so Limón. Perhaps it's Limón's theater background. Perhaps it helps to have a literate interviewer like Roberto Tejada. Limón snags us with her poems but she reels us in when she reflects on her poems:

"If I'm really listening to the world, it's talking."

"Enter the world through attention."

"I think (poetry) can change us."



She leaves us with this:

"How little we understand anything.
But maybe we are not here to understand, but to witness."


From the Inprint Houston website: Ada Limón will serve as the 2022-2023 U.S. Poet Laureate. About her work, Tracy K. Smith in The Guardian writes, “Limón is a poet of ecstatic revelation,” and Richard Blanco adds, “Both soft and tender, enormous and resounding, her poetic gestures entrance and transfix.” Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Bright Dead Things, which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is also the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Carrying. According to The Washington Post, “Evocative dreams and pivotal memories make this collection a powerful example of how to carry the things that define us without being broken by them.


For more of Ada Limón, you might like to listen to her interview with host Krista Tippett at On Being.

My favorite poems from her collections:
"How to Triumph Like a Girl"
"The Conditional"
"The Raincoat"
"Dead Stars"
"A New National Anthem"
"Carrying"
"Give Me This"
"The Hurting Kind"
"The Magnificent Frigatebird"

[May Crain · Rating 1 out of 5]

I received a free copy in the mail and I cannot be dishonest. This book is terrible. I wouldn’t consider it poetry at all. There is no rhythm or creativity. They are just random words splattered on a page in a strange format. Most pages aren’t even filled. It is a perfect example of how “insta poetry” has corrupted the publishing industry. AI writes better poetry than humans now. Literally. It’s just nonsense put on a page for a couple of extra bucks. Anyone who says they like poetry like this is lying. Some of them were a little better than others, but overall, for the most part, it’s just bad writing. It’s basically just regular dull sentences chopped up into small pieces and calling it “poetry.” At this point, poetry will never be what it was again. The poetry industry is forever ruined by the instagram poetry. It is cringeworthy trash.

Listen to this:


We solved the problem of the wind

with an orange.

Now we've got the problem

of the orange.

Jimmy once said, Do you get along with everyone

as good as this?

I did not know how to say yes.

In Albuquerque yes is hard/easy/look

a roadrunner!

You there, across the table, could be my opposite of

enemy. I do not want 8 babies.

Are you hooked on height?


Yeah, no. Not for me. It’s just nonsensical. It’s giving social media influencer trying to sound “deep.”

[Monica Snyder · Rating 5 out of 5]

While Everything Else Was Falling Apart

In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen
years ago now, the L train came clanking by
where someone had fat-Sharpied a black heart
on the yellow pillar you leaned on during a bleak day
(brittle and no notes from anyone you crushed upon).
Above ground, the spring sun was the saddest one
(doing work, but also none). What were you wearing?
Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?
A tall man was learning from a vendor how to pronounce
churro. High in the sticky clouds of time, he kept
repeating churro while eating a churro. How to say
this made you want to live? No hand to hold,
still here it was: someone giving someone comfort
and someone memorizing hard how to ask for it again.

[Sunny Thao · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one for the soul. I am ashamed that it took me so long to read Ada Limon's poems, and I am also blessed to have finally found her. I saw her speak with Robin Wall Kimmerer at an event in Minneapolis, and was so moved by her presence and wisdom. So, too, shall you be moved when you immerse yourself in her poetry.

She reminded me to remember and appreciate the beauty of this life, to keep fighting for it, and to witness and love the simple miracles in a star, a patch of moss, in a swallow's song, in ancient trees, in the love I hold for my husband and my family. "I always expect to be moved..."

"We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark."

[Erica Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always feel greedy when I read collected or selected poems. I whisper to myself, do you know how hard it is to write one good poem?! And you expect hundreds of them? Still, it is compelling to see how a poet develops, what themes or techniques are dropped, which ones persist (what Frank Bidart might call “radical givens”). I’ve been a Limón fan since sharks in the rivers, and it was a joy—a greedy joy—to read all these poems at once. They are generous but not without a bite, like a domesticated fox curled up by the fire, one eye open, beautiful and changeable at once.

[Benjamin Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely. The poetry I’m used to from Ada, full of blooming life green and wet. The air just cold enough to see the voice of a songbird; the world filled with decay and desert, wind blown skulls so white on the sand they seem to reflect starlight. The push and pull of a perfect storm, thunderously galloping the climbing the hilltops of our lives, and she gives witness to her own with such a delightful voice, almost heavy as it reaches the summit, the smile never quite removed from a crooked, panting grin.

[Lori M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Startlement is a collection of new and selected poems by Ada Limón, the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States. In this collection, there are treasures and depths to explore, vast thoughts and intimate wonderings. While not as easily accessible as other poets whose work I have read, the beauty of Limón’s work is in the lyrical nature of her writing. The words flow and lilt with a life all their own. From the tender fierceness of “This Darkness” to the escapism longed for in “Let Loose,” there is mastery on every page. Beautiful.

[Gemma Laurence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful. One of my favorite contemporary poets. She writes with so much grace and truth. Hadn’t realized when I purchased this impulsively at a bookstore but this is a collection of much of her previously published work, which I’d already read. Some new ones at the end. No problem! Love every poem in this collection, and the new ones are spectacular.

Favorites:

While Everything Else Was Falling Apart
Hell or High Water
My Father’s Mustache
Calling Things What They Are
A Good Story
What I Didn’t Know Becore

[meesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

it’s been a while since i’ve read poetry, and even longer since i’ve been moved by a collection like this. reading this felt like a homecoming, a reminder of my roots, why i fell in love with language, with word play, with rhythm and metaphor. ada limón, thank you.

“perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward / the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love / from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe, / like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together / peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.”

[Nora Suntken · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is really good, but I still am not totally a poetry person. I want to get better at reading it since I do think to some extent understand poetry is a skill. I love Ada though! So talented (and so funny). I did enjoy that with how this was collected, you could really see a glimpse into her mind per collection. They all felt so distinct from one another! I think I’ll revisit this again. I recommend it, but I just wish I was better at poetry!!

[Caroline (readtotheend on IG) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Startlement is a collection of poems by Ada Limón, the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States. It's a beautiful collection and as someone who does not read or have read much poetry in my life, I found it to be meditative to read through this collection. There is nature, there is family and there is beauty in the ordinary. There were some standout poems for me but I think a poetry lover would more deeply appreciate this work.

[Molly Kavanaugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Along with reading Ada's wonderful "new and selected" poems, listen to her interview on the podcast "Tricycle Talks," where she reads poems like "Hell or High Water"

"so when the hospice nurse came and said "You
have no religion right?" I didn't know how to answer,
because we did, it was this, it was all those years
tied together on the road, singing at the top of our
lungs, harmonious and inharmonious both and with gusto."

[karissa✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

And here we are, diligent birds,
trying to make a small life out of paper and string.

Seed-hoarder, stream-nester,
warm-blooded, beak-lover, bird-speaker---

go to the water, bird,
love the blue world, bird
money means nothing, bird,
clothes mean nothing, bird,
keep going into the world, bird,
startle the sad spring air with the whirring of your wings.