Bright Dead Things

by Ada Limón

Overview

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bright Dead Things examines the dangerous thrill of living in a world you must leave one day and the search to find something that is “disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.”

A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, this fourth collection 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. Ada Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571314710
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	09/15/2015
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	24,475
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate and the editor of the national bestselling anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World. She is the author of The Hurting Kind and five other collections of poems, including The Carrying, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Bright Dead Things, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her children's book In Praise of Mystery will be published in October 2024. Limón has received both a Guggenheim and a MacArthur Fellowship, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review. She now resides in California where she was born and raised.

Editorial Reviews

08/24/2015
Limón (Sharks in the Rivers) goes into deep introspection mode in a fourth collection in which her speakers struggle with loss and alienation. As her poems move across varied geographies (New York, Kentucky, California), Limón narrates experiences in bewildering landscapes that should otherwise feel familiar. Perhaps feelings of alienation result from intersections of identity; perhaps they are the cost of memory, a theme woven through each of the collection’s four sections. Memory inhibits Limón’s speakers’ acclimation to change: “You’re the muscle/ I cut from the bone and still the bone remembers.” Alienated, she returns to places and memories that are not familiar. “Bellow” exemplifies a palpable grief over feelings of loss and lost-ness. In it, Limón’s ungendered speaker, estranged from any surroundings, is rendered unable to communicate feelings of loss. Using a litany of dark imagery, Limón’s speaker maps where language fails, ending the poem with the insinuation of an undefinable, haunting sound, as if the speaker is a wandering phantom. In “Home Fires,” the poet wonders, “How could I have imagined this? Mortal me,/ brutal disaster born out of so much greed.” Recurring instances of anxiety about mortality in Limón’s poems complicate experiences so richly written and felt. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award
A Best Poetry Book of 2015: New York Times and Buzzfeed

“Effortlessly lyrical.”—New York Times

“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

“These poems are, as my students might say, hella intimate. They are meticulously honed and gorgeously crafted. They marry the lyric poem’s interior emotional intensity with its exterior mode of social conveyance and aesthetic beauty. . . . The best compliment one can give a book of poems is that the book loves the reader. Bright Dead Things doesn’t just love poetry; it loves the reader. My hunch is, Reader, you’ll love it too.”—Huffington Post

“Bright Dead Things breeds a particular mixture of wildness. The mixture is by turns melodious and tight. Limón’s poems are like fires: charring the page, but leaving a smoke that remains past the close of the book.”—The Millions

“Limón’s work is destined to find a place with readers on the strength of her voice alone. Her intensity here is paradoxically set against the often slow burn of life in Kentucky, and the results will please readers.”—Flavorwire

“Poet and Critic Stephen Burt says, ‘Prose sense is to poetry as tonality is to music.’ And I see that sense of prose cushioned in each poem included in this leguminous compilation. The works wear complexity on their sleeves with reassuring accessibility on their faces; to say it more succinctly, there’s a tough grilling of the soul and champagnes served to the measure of each one’s taste.”—The Rumpus

“A masterpiece."—Shondaland

“In 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. 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.”—Gregory Orr

“Limón doesn’t write as if she needs us. She writes as if she wants us. Her words reveal, coax, pull, see us. In Bright Dead Things we read desire, ache, what human beings rarely have the heart or audacity to speak of alone—without the help of a poet with the most generous of eyes.”—Nikky Finney

“Limón does far more than merely reflect the world: she continually transforms it, thereby revealing herself as an everyday symbolist and high level duende enabler. At the end of one poem she writes, ‘What the heart wants? The heart wants / her horses back,’ and suddenly even this most urban reader feels wild and free.”—Matthew Zapruder

“Both soft and tender, enormous and resounding, her poetic gestures entrance and transfix.”—Richard Blanco

“In her newest volume of poems, Limón delves into the divided self—self separated by geography, by loss, by change, by circumstance. . . . Generous of heart, intricate and accessible, the poems in this book are wondrous and deeply moving.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“A poet whose verse exudes warmth and compassion, Limón is at the height of her creative powers, and Bright Dead Things is her most gorgeous book of poems.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Richly written and felt.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

★ 06/01/2015
In her newest volume of poems, Limón (Sharks in the Rivers) delves into the divided self—self separated by geography, by loss, by change, by circumstance. In "Torn," she says "something/ that loves itself so much it moves across/ the boundaries of death to touch itself/ once more, to praise both divided sides/ equally…." Limón's landscape is Brooklyn, California, and the horsey and blue-grassy hills of Kentucky, and her writing is intensely intimate and wild, softly sensual and bold. In the mostly lyric narratives, with an occasional prose poem included, loss and redemption are apparent, and love—whether tough love or easy love—is resilient. "How good it is to love/ live things, even when what they've done/ is terrible, how much we each want to be…turned loose/ into our own wide open without a single/ harness of sin to stop us." VERDICT Generous of heart, intricate and accessible, the poems in this book are wondrous and deeply moving.—Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Library Journal