Ada Limón – författare

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness - between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves - from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limón.'I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,' writes Limón. 'I am the hurting kind.' What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world's pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings - and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they 'do not / care to be seen as symbols'?With Limón's remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions - incorporating others' stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honour parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behaviour of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. 'Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning's shade,' writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, 'she is doing what she can to survive.''Limón is a poet of ecstatic revelation' Guardian 'I can always rely on an Ada Limón poem to give me hope . . . Limón gives us two brains in her poems, too, revealing new ways to view the world' New York Times Magazine 'Ada Limón is a bright light in a dark time. Her keen attention to the natural world is only matched by her incredible emotional honesty' Vanity Fair

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY 2019Ada 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 GayFrom National Book Critics Circle Award Winner 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.

As part of her tenure as US poet laureate, Ada Limón has written “In Praise of Mystery,” which will be engraved on the Europa Clipper spacecraft that launches to Jupiter and its moons in October 2024. Published here as Limón’s debut picture book, this luminous poem is illustrated by celebrated and internationally renowned artist Peter Sís.In Praise of Mystery celebrates humankind’s endless curiosity, asks us what it means to explore beyond our known world, and shows how the unknown can reflect us back to ourselves.

'Bright Dead Things buoyed me in this dismal year. I'm thankful for this collection, for its wisdom and generosity, for its insistence on holding tight to beauty even as we face disintegration and destruction.' Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, Bright Dead Things considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact - tracing in intimate detail the ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth and falls in love. In these extraordinary poems Ada Limón's heart becomes a 'huge beating genius machine' striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. 'I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,' the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous, accessible, and 'effortlessly lyrical' (New York Times) - though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt and lived.

The speaker in this extraordinary collection finds herself multiply dislocated: from her childhood in California, from her family's roots in Mexico, from a dying parent, from her prior self. The world is always in motion and it is also full of risk.In such a world, how should one proceed? Throughout Sharks in the Rivers, Limón suggests that we must cleave to the world as it 'keep[s] opening before us,' for, if we pay attention, we can be one with its complex, ephemeral, and beautiful strangeness. Loss is perpetual, and each person's mouth 'is the same / mouth as everyone's, all trying to say the same thing.' For Limón, it's the saying - individual and collective - that transforms each of us into 'a wound overcome by wonder,' that allows 'the wind itself' to be our 'own wild whisper'.

'I marvel at Ada Limón's ability to weave on the page her playfulness and wisdom. Her lyricism dances. This is the poetry of a tender and compassionate human' Joan Baez'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'Ada Limón is a bright light in a dark time' Vanity Fair'Limón is a poet of ecstatic revelation' Tracy K. Smith, GuardianDrawing from six previously published books - including widely acclaimed collections The Hurting Kind, The Carrying, and Bright Dead Things - as well as introducing 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' (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.'

The poems in Lucky Wreck trace the excitement of plans and the necessary swerving detours we must take when those plans fail. Looking to shipwrecks on the television, road trips ending in traffic accidents, and homes that become sites of infestation, Ada Limón finds threads of hope amid an array of small tragedies and significant setbacks. Open, honest, and grounded, the poems in this collection seek answers to familiar questions and teach us ways to cope with the pain of many losses with earnestness and humor. Through the wrecks, these poems continue to offer assurance. This darkness is not the scary one, it’s the one before the sun comes up, the one you can still breathe in.  Celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Limón’s award-winning debut, this edition includes a new introduction by the poet that reflects on the book and on how her writing practice has developed over time.