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'Ada Limón is a poet of ecstatic revelation . . . a book of deep wisdom and urgent vulnerability' Tracy K. Smith, Guardian
'Vulnerable, tender, acute . . . The Carrying is a gift' Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former US Poet Laureate
'Exquisite poems' Roxane Gay
From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Ada Limón comes The Carrying - her most powerful collection yet.
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility - 'What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?' - and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: 'Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.' And still Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. 'Fine then, / I'll take it,' she writes. 'I'll take it all.'
The Carrying leads us deeper towards the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.
100 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 14, 2018
“But friends, it’s lunchtime, and doesn’t my mouth still work; my appetite, my forked tongue?”
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?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.
Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?
What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain
for the safety of others, for earth,
if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,
if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,
rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?