What follows are selections from that latter interview: For further reading, check out these two interviews Ada gave with The Rumpus Poetry Book Club and with Nicole Sealey of National Book Foundation. If you’ve not yet read it, I highly recommend it looks like today the Kindle version is on sale for $6.91 in the States. Copyright © 2015 by Ada Limón.īright Dead Things is one of my favorite poetry collections. “I Remember the Carrots” by Ada Limón, from Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2015). I still want to kill the carrots because I can. This surrender? What I mean is: there are days Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong. Who scolded me, rightly, for killing his whole crop. I broke the new rootsĪnd carried them, like a prize, to my father Their spidery neon tops in the garden’s plot.Īnd so I ripped them all out. When I was a kid, I was excited about carrots,

The advance of fulfillment, and of desire – In Kentucky, imagining how agreeable I’ll be – 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.I haven’t given up on trying to live a good life,Ī really good one even, sitting in the kitchen 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'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 by ada limon