The needs and wants expressed by Limón in the four sections that make up her National Book Award nominated collection are anything but simple.

Luckily for readers, the wants layered throughout the poems of Ada Limón’s far-reaching fourth collection, Bright Dead Things, transform simple moments into dynamite capable of blasting the tops off mountains.

While want today retains its sense of lack, the word has stretched over time toward flippancy, as all too often our wishes and cravings can be easily met with a quick jaunt to the nearest convenience store. At its origins, want is fully negative, to be lacking or missing. Limon's poems are like fires: charring the page, but leaving a smoke that remains past the close of the book.Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2015. The mixture is by turns melodious and tight. * Huffington Post *īright Dead Things breeds a particular mixture of wildness. Bright Dead Things doesn't just love poetry it loves the reader. The best compliment one can give a book of poems is that the book loves the reader. The radio in her new, rural home warns 'stay safe and seek shelter' and yet the heart seeks love, risk, and strangeness - and finds it everywhere. In Ada Limon's Bright Dead Things, there's a fierce jazz and sass ('this life is a fist / of fast wishes caught by nothing, / but the fishhook of tomorrow's tug') and there's sadness - a grappling with death and loss that forces the imagination to a deep response. I am 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 Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group ISBN: 9781472154569 Number of pages: 128 Weight: 127 g Dimensions: 194 x 126 x 16 mm MEDIA REVIEWSīelongs to a new poetry that is readable, heartfelt and full of vivid imagery * the Times * Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds and Mark Doty, Limon's work is consistently generous, accessible, and 'effortlessly lyrical' ( New York Times) - though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt and lived. In these extraordinary poems Ada Limon's heart becomes a 'huge beating genius machine' striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. 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 YouĪ 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. ' Bright Dead Things buoyed me in this dismal year.

Bright dead things review