This Big Fake World: A Story in Verse

by Ada Limon

At the heart of Ada Limon's This Big Fake World is a story that revolves around the book's unlikely Hero, a man in a gray suit; the object of his affection, known only as The Hardware Store Lady; and his friend Lewis, the town drunk, who compulsively writes letters to Ronald Reagan. Limon takes these seemingly ordinary people, all longing for love and connection in a world that seems completely indifferent to them, and through her extraordinary wit and imagination, transforms them into the compelling sort of characters rarely found in contemporary poetry. Winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize, this is Limon's second book of poetry.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published December 20, 2006

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

[Richard Cho · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't call myself an avid poetry reader, but I can't think of any poet working today who is better than Limon. I understand that there are different types of poetry, and the judgement is highly subjective, but if I think of things like: word choice, imagination, irony, subversion of expectation, and the beautiful affect the poetry brings about, Ada is surely on top.

I read many of her recent poetry collection, and I was curious about her earlier days. This Big Fake World is more like a poetic prose, and there is one storyline that flow through all the poems in this book. We have a hero, who has a marriage problem, and there is his friend, who writes letters to Ronald Reason, and there is a lady who works at the hardware store who might or might not become the hero's paramour.

What Ada does best is beautifying what is mundane. When you look close, there always is something beautiful, even in sadness and life-troubles.

Truly a gifted poet.

---------------------------------

Their hearts explode
from one dumb tragedy or another



... in the color of wheelbarrow rust





the game of memory a simple
act of rebellion against future monotony.


4.

Precious things will come to them,
even in their simple wooden hour of
stillness.

He walks to the corner and is surprised
by a late snowfall, the sky endlessly giving.

5.

She thinks she can almost hear it,
the snow falling, deliberate proof
that even the sky wants to return and return
to this shattering world.

[Caitlin]

this big fake world is funny and sad and clever and sly, filled with layered meanings and layered commentaries, giving a space for the man in the gray suit to be a hero, for the drunk to have a voice, for the woman in the hardware story to be a heroine. It is also, in Limón’s skillful hands, a reminder of the strange, multifaceted splendor of the most quotidian things around us.

My full review: https://essentiallyanerd.wordpress.co...

[Twila Newey · Rating 4 out of 5]

65pp. A story told in verse. A love story. There is also a character who writes creepy letters to Ronald Reagan. There are a few that are breath taking and a few that are laugh-out-loud funny and a few that are uncomfortable (Lewis, the letter writer). The affect is sort of weird and wonderful. I recommend it--original and quirky. Also, I want to be friends with Ada Limon in real life.

Here's one of my favorites. If you like it, buy her book. Poets have to eat.

The Hardware Lady Watches as Our Hero Comes Close

This unknown yellow think keeps rising
the way the horizon seems to find itself
again when the carnival ride ends and the
people get out of their lacquered compartments
to see the world, straight and permanent, lying there.
It is like that now as he hovers near
her counter, lingering, purposeful. The days have
made him bolder, his hands steady near
the cash register. She wants to ring him up.
She feels there is a safety in him, not
like the safety on a gun, but a safety like a
place you could go, lay down your tools
and tremors, where the hands do not invade,
but instead bless a place where harm too often stayed.

p. 62

[mzd · Rating 3 out of 5]

"He is trying to make his love
smaller like a fist.
Of this he speaks to no one.
It is the same way he wished
to pray to something tiny"

"Ronald, its mouth is six feet across. That's just an inch taller than I am. That mouth could swallow me lengthwise. Ever since I've learned about that mouth, I haven't stopped thinking about it. What a mouth, what a big mouth. I have been wanting to be swallowed whole, Ronald. I have not told my best friend or the people at the beer distributors. I feel phenomenally selfish about it. I want that swallowing-mouth all to myself. I want it to take me in, in its big mouth, and keep me there until I grow old in its warm, warm belly, floating in this big fake world."

"From the sidewalk, defrosting, he sees tiny blades of grass and soon, it is not a hard life at all, it is manageable, in fact, the whole of its wideness could fit inside her mouth."

[Lea · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a story in verse about a creepy old guy with a crush on a random lady that isn’t his wife and another creepy guy writing random letters to Ronald Reagan. The point is lost on me.
I did enjoy the Prologue and Epilogue, but nothing else. This is the first poetry collection by Limón I haven’t enjoyed.

[Matt Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Relationships are fragile and weird, and Ada Limón captures this perfectly.

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boy, am I glad that I was subscribing to Pearl Magazine the year this book won their poetry prize--2005. Frank X. Gaspar judged the contest that year and describes it well as “… a narrative of fracture and repair, that through its art becomes a whole—and a whole new thing.”

A story in verse, this quirky, hybrid epic is a web of lives constructed by Limon's skillful unraveling of her characters' interactions. Its success is in the simultaneous interdependency and individual merit of each of its poems, which stand as beautifully alone as when layered together, showing the reader a faceted world from many angles. The narrator is a compassionate voyeur, indeed.

My favorite poems: “Lewis Writes a Letter to Ronald Reagan During the Holidays,” “He Passes the Room Where His Wife Sleeps,” and “Safe From Trains.”

[Matt Morris]

Read my review of this & other books at https://miscmss.blogspot.com/2018/03/...