Startlement: New and Selected Poems

by Ada Limón

Overview

An essential collection spanning nearly twenty years of emphatic, fearlessly original poetry from one of America’s most celebrated living writers.

Drawing from six previously published books—including widely acclaimed collections The Hurting Kind, The Carrying, and Bright Dead Things—as well as 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” (The 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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639550517
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	09/30/2025
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States. She is the editor of the You Are Here anthology and the author of five collections of poems, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. She’s also the author of the picture book In Praise of Mystery based on the poem engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper. Limón is a MacArthur Fellow, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a TIME Woman of the Year. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review. She lives in Glen Ellen, California.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Ada Limón's Previous Works:

“Ada Limón is a bright light in a dark time.”—Vanity Fair

“I can always rely on an Ada Limón poem to give me hope, but Limón’s poems don’t give us the kind of facile Hallmark hope; rather, her hope is hard-earned, even laced with grief or happiness. . . . Limón is a master at making a simple idea (that of hindsight, seeing the bright side of things) askew. ‘And so I have / two brains now,’ she writes. ‘Two entirely different brains.’ Limón gives us two brains in her poems too, revealing new ways to view the world.”—Victoria Chang, New York Times Magazine

“A poet whose verse exudes warmth and compassion, Ada Limón is at the height of her creative powers.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Limón is a poet of ecstatic revelation. Her poetry feels fast, full of details, often playful, and driven by conversational voice. This book represents a powerful deepening of the poet’s perspective. . . . It’s a book of deep wisdom and urgent vulnerability, driven by language that feels not only beautiful but permanent and powerfully wrought, like a mountain. It leads you to the beautiful bright mountaintop of language, then guides you gently down into the rocky valleys of a conscious human heart.”—Tracy K. Smith, Guardian

“Ada is one of those people who can recognize all the ways we inflict pain on one another, not to mention our planet, without getting consumed by it. She writes in that space between grief and joy."—NPR

“In her sixth collection of poetry, The Hurting Kind, Ada Limón seeks to find the intimate connections between the seemingly disparate in the everyday: humans and the natural world, the living and the dead, the intellectual and the spiritual. The collection’s title is apt—it is a testament to the innate power of feeling, whether grief, rage, or tenderness. For Limón, the current Poet Laureate of the United States, who declares herself ‘too sensitive, a weeper . . . the hurting kind,’ even the seemingly banal facets of our existence deserve not only observation, but also empathy and amazement.”—TIME Magazine

“Exquisite … A powerful example of how to carry the things that define us without being broken by them.”—Washington Post

“All of Limón’s books have found a home on my bookshelf, each volume a heartfelt reckoning of what it is to be alive. In her collections, I find a grace that demonstrates her versatility and wisdom as well as a ‘surrendering.’ She explains that the central question of her work is, ‘How do we live in the world?’ Yet she’s a poet as comfortable with questions as with answers.”—Guernica

“[Ada Limón] is one of my all-time favorite writers, someone whose work I return to again and again for solace, inspiration, and truth.”—The Atlantic

From the Publisher