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• Startlement: New and Selected Poems - 2025 Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, MN
• And, Too, The Fox (illustrated by Gaby D'Alessandro) - 2025 Carolrhoda Books, Minneapolis, MN
• You are Here: Poetry in the Natural World (edited and introduced by Ada Limón, 24th Poet Laureate of the United States) - 2024 Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, MN
• In Praise of Mystery (illustrated by Peter Sís) - 2024 Norton Young Readers, New York, NY
• The End of Poetry - 2022 Weight of Bees, Lexington, KY

• Ada Limón website - https://adalimon.com/

  Ada Limón is the author of seven books of poetry, including Startlement: New & Selected Poems; The Hurting Kind, which was a finalist for the Griffin Prize; The Carrying, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and was 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. Limón is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a 2024 Time Magazine Woman of the Year. She is the author of two picture books, In Praise of Mystery as well as And, Too, The Fox, and was the editor of the anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World. She served as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States.

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  Ada Limón

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Ada Limón
  Limón in 2022
  Limón in 2022
  Born March 28, 1976 (age 49)
  Sonoma, California, U.S.
  Education University of Washington (BFA)
  New York University (MFA)
  Genre Poetry
  Notable awards National Book Critics Circle Award
  Spouse Lucas Marquardt
  United States Poet Laureate
  In office
  2022–2025
  Preceded by Joy Harjo
  Succeeded by Arthur Sze
  Website
  adalimon.com
  Ada Limón (born March 28, 1976) is an American poet.[1] On July 12, 2022, she was named the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States by the Librarian of Congress.[2][3][4] This made her the first Latina to be Poet Laureate of the United States.[5] She is married to Lucas Marquardt.[6]

  Early years and education
  Limón, who is of Mexican-American descent, grew up in Sonoma, California. She is the daughter of Ken Limón and Stacia Brady, the latter being the cover artist for her daughter's books. Ada says she developed a love for poetry in high school, despite dedicating her extracurricular activities to theatrical productions.[7] She attended the drama school at the University of Washington, where she studied theatre. After taking writing courses from professors including Colleen J. McElroy, she went on to receive her MFA from New York University in 2001,[8] where she studied with Sharon Olds, Philip Levine, Marie Howe, Mark Doty, Agha Shahid Ali, and Tom Sleigh.

  Upon graduation, Limón received a fellowship to live and write at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 2003, she received a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and in the same year won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry.[citation needed]

  To support her writing career, Limón began working in marketing for Condé Nast. She quit this job following her stepmother’s untimely death, which was a catalyst for Limón to decide to pursue her writing career before it was too late.[7]

  Career

  Limón at SXSW Interactive in 2024, talking about her work with NASA

  Limón in 2019
  After 12 years in New York City, where she worked for various magazines such as Martha Stewart Living, GQ, and Travel + Leisure, Limón now lives in both Lexington, Kentucky and Sonoma, California, where she writes and teaches.[8]

  Limón's first book, Lucky Wreck, was chosen by Jean Valentine as the winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize in 2005, while her second book, This Big Fake World, was the winner of the Pearl Poetry Prize in 2006. The two books came out within less than a year of each other. In a 2014 article in Compose magazine, she stated: "I went from having no books at all, to having two in the span of a year. I felt like I had won the lottery, well, without the money. I suppose, in my life, I’ve never done things the ordinary way. I’m either deep in the bottom of the well or nowhere near water."[9] She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte low-residency M.F.A. program, and the "24 Pearl Street" online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.

  When her third book, Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions, 2010) was released, a reviewer writing in The Brooklyn Rail observed: "Unlike much contemporary poetry, Limón's work isn’t text-derivative or deconstructivist. She personalizes her homilies, stamping them with the authenticity of invention and self-discovery."[10] Limón's fourth book, Bright Dead Things, was released in 2015. She was shortlisted as a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry. Her 2018 book, The Carrying, subsequently won a National Book Critics Circle Award.[11]

  Her poem "State Bird" appeared in the June 2, 2014, issue of The New Yorker, and her poem "How to Triumph Like a Girl" (2013), which portrays different aspects of female horses, was awarded the 2015 Pushcart Prize.[12][13] Her work has also appeared in the Harvard Review and the Pleiades.[14]

  Limón was appointed 24th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in 2022 and reappointed for a second, two-year term in 2023.[15]

  As part of her laureateship, she wrote an original poem, “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” dedicated to NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which debuted on June 1, 2023.[16] The poem is engraved in her own handwriting on a metal plate affixed to the Europa Clipper spacecraft. The Europa Clipper launched on October 14, 2024, and is expected to arrive in the Jupiter system in 2030, where it will perform flybys of Jupiter's Galilean moon, Europa.

  Her project as poet laureate was the "You Are Here" project which consisted of a poetry collection (You Are Here: Poetry and the Natural World), an installation of picnic tables in cooperation with the National Park Service (You Are Here: Poetry in Parks), and a call for responses to the question "What would you write in response to the landscape around you?" via the hashtag #youareherepoetry.[17] She stated " In conceiving of the project, I wanted something that could both praise our sacred and natural wonders and also speak the complex truths of this urgent time."[17]

  She has been a beneficiary of the Kentucky Foundation for Women.[4]

  Awards and honors

  This side of a commemorative plate mounted on NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft features Limón's handwritten "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa" (blurred out for copyright reasons)
  In 2013, Limón served as a judge for the National Book Award for Poetry.[18]

  In 2020, Limón was awarded a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. [19]

  In July 2022, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden appointed her the 24th United States Poet Laureate for the term of 2022–2023.[4] Hayden renewed Limón's term for another two years in April 2023.[20]

  In October 2023, she was named a MacArthur Fellow receiving the "genius" grant from the John and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.[21]

  She received a 2023 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for The Hurting Kind.

  In February 2024, Limón was named as one of Time magazine's 12 Women of the Year for 2024, for being "extraordinary leaders who are working toward a more equal world".[22]

  To raise public awareness of the Europa Clipper mission, NASA undertook a "Message In A Bottle" campaign, i.e. actually "Send Your Name to Europa" campaign on June 1, 2023, through which people around the world are invited to send their names as signatories to a poem called, "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa" written by Ada Limón. The poem connects the two water worlds — Earth, yearning to reach out and understand what makes a world habitable, and Europa, waiting with secrets yet to be explored. The poem is engraved on a tantalum metal plate that seals an opening into the vault. The inward-facing side of the metal plate is engraved with the poem in the poet's own handwriting, along with participants' names that will be etched onto microchips mounted on the spacecraft.[23]

  On Friday, August 18, 2023, the City of Sonoma paid tribute to Limón, with a Bench Dedication. The bench is adorned with quotes from Limón's work and is situated in front of Readers’ Books in Sonoma.[24]

  Year Title Award Result Ref.
  2005 Lucky Wreck Autumn House Poetry Prize Winner [25]
  2006 This Big Fake World Pearl Poetry Prize Winner [26]
  2015 Bright Dead Things National Book Award for Poetry Finalist [27][3]
  National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry Finalist [3]
  2018 The Carrying National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry Winner [28][3]
  2019 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Finalist [29]
  2023 The Hurting Kind Griffin Poetry Prize Finalist [30]
  PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award Winner
  Bibliography
  Poetry
  Collections
  Lucky Wreck, Autumn House Press, 2006, ISBN 978-1-932870-08-4
  This Big Fake World, Pearl Editions, 2006, ISBN 978-1-888219-35-7
  Sharks in the Rivers, Milkweed Editions, 2010, ISBN 978-1-57131-438-3
  Bright Dead Things, Milkweed Editions, 2015, ISBN 978-1-57131-925-8
  The Carrying, Milkweed Editions, 2018, ISBN 978-1-57131-512-0
  The Hurting Kind, Milkweed Editions, 2022, ISBN 978-1-63955-049-4
  Shelter: A Love Letter To Trees, Scribd Originals, 2022, ISBN 978-1-09444-438-3
  You Are Here, Milkweed Editions, 2024, ISBN 978-1-57131-568-7
  Children's Books
  In Praise of Mystery, Norton Young Readers, 2024, ISBN 978-1-324-05400-9
  And, Too, The Fox, Lerner Publishing, 2025, ISBN 979-8-7656-3925-2
  Chapbooks
  99¢ Heart, Big Game Books, 2007
  What Sucks Us In Will Surely Swallow Us Whole, Cinematheque Press, 2009
  Recorded poetry readings and talks
  Video recordings of Ada Limón from The Library of Congress
  Ada Limón: poetry reading; February 23rd, 2017 from The Elliston Project: Poetry Readings and Lectures at the University of Cincinnati
  Video recordings of Ada Limón from Voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center's audiovisual archive
  List of poems
  Year Title First published Reprinted/collected
  2010 Sharks in the rivers Limón, Ada (2010). Sharks in the rivers. Milkweed Editions. ISBN 978-1-57131-438-3.
  2014 State Bird Limón, Ada (June 2, 2014). "State Bird". The New Yorker. 90 (15): 30.
  2017 The Burying Beetle Limón, Ada (February 27, 2017). "The Burying Beetle". The New Yorker. 93 (2): 39.
  Overpass Limón, Ada (December 4, 2017). "Overpass". The New Yorker. 93 (39): 27.
  2021 Privacy Limón, Ada (March 22, 2021). "Privacy". The New Yorker. 97 (5): 51.

• Academy of American Poets - https://poets.org/poet/ada-limon

  Ada Limón poet laureate icon
  1976 –
  United States Poet Laureate, 2022–2025
  Ada Limón was born on March 28, 1976, in Sonoma, California. As a child, she was greatly influenced by the visual arts and artists, including her mother, Stacia Brady. In 2001, she received an MFA from the Creative Writing Program at New York University.

  Limón’s first poetry collection, Lucky Wreck (Autumn House Press, 2006), was the winner of the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize, selected by Jean Valentine. Her other collections are Startlement: New & Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions, 2025); The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2022), short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize; The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions, 2010); and This Big Fake World (Pearl Editions, 2006), winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize. She is the editor of the anthology You are Here: Poetry in the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, 2024). She is also the author of two picture books: In Praise of Mystery (Norton Young Readers, 2024), with illustrations by Peter Sís; and And, Too, the Fox (Lerner, 2025), with illustrations by Gaby D’Alessandro.

  Of Limón’s work, the poet Richard Blanco writes, “Both soft and tender, enormous and resounding, her poetic gestures entrance and transfix.”

  A 2001–2002 fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, Limón is also the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2022, Limón was appointed United States poet laureate and, in 2023, was appointed to serve a second two-year term. In April of the same year, she served as Guest Editor of the Poem-a-Day series. As poet laureate, her signature project was called You Are Here, which focused on placing poetry installations in National Parks across the country and releasing an anthology of new nature poetry. She wrote a poem that was engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper Spacecraft and launched to the second moon of Jupiter in October 2024. She was named a Time magazine woman of the year in 2024.

  Limón lives in Glen Ellen, California.

  Ada Limón
  Courtesy of Ada Limón
  School/Movements
  Contemporary
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  Bibliography
  Year Title
  2024 In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa
  2022 When It Comes Down To It
  2022 It Begins With the Trees
  2022 Drowning Creek
  2022 Salvage
  2021 Lover
  2020 Give Me This
  2020 What It Must Have Felt Like
  2018 Publicity
  2018 The Raincoat

• All Things Considered - https://www.npr.org/2025/04/29/nx-s1-5377607/ada-limon-reflects-on-her-tenure-as-the-poet-laureate-and-bringing-us-back-to-wonder

  Ada Limón reflects on her tenure as the poet laureate and bringing us back to wonder
  April 29, 20254:35 PM ET
  Heard on All Things Considered
  By

  Matthew Cloutier

  ,

  Sarah Handel

  ,

  Mary Louise Kelly

  8-Minute Listen
  Transcript
  Ada Limón
  Ada Limón

  Shawn Miller/Library of Congress
  When Ada Limón became the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2022, she took that moment she used that moment to reflect on poetry's power to connect — or to reconnect — people to the world around them and to their sense of love, grief and healing.

  Her signature project placed poetry in National Parks around the country. The idea is to praise both what she calls "our sacred and natural wonders" and also speak to "the complex truths of this urgent time."

  Limón's tenure has drawn to a close, and she joined All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly to talk about what this time has meant to her.

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  Culture
  U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon answers a Wild Card question
  This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

  Interview highlights
  Mary Louise Kelly: You crisscrossed the country as poet laureate. I don't usually think of a poet as a road warrior job where you have to get up and get on planes. But tell me what you've seen, what people have told you about how poetry fits into their lives right now?

  Ada Limón: One of the misconceptions I had when I first took on the role was this idea that I was supposed to somehow bring poetry to the people, when in reality it was much more common for me to sit and receive the stories of people having an intimate connection with poetry already or having poetry readings in libraries or in schools and people really fostering the connection with poetry on a very human, intimate level.

  Culture
  Poet Laureate Ada Limón hopes to help people commune with nature in new project
  Kelly: This is poems they had written and wanted to share with you?

  Limón: Yeah. Sometimes they were poems that they had written and sometimes they were poems that they had memorized and loved and put on the walls of hospitals. There's one place I went to where there were poetry installations on the walls of bathroom stalls.

  So, it was always, for me, an act of receiving all these wonderful stories. And it was really heartening to know that there were so many people in the world that were not just writing sometimes secret poems, but also gathering for the sake of poetry.

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  Kelly: Well, heartening and maybe a little surprising, because it seems Americans are reading less and less for pleasure. I saw that the NEA, the National Endowment for the Arts', latest reporting is fewer than half of adults report reading one book in the last year. You're telling me poetry is alive and well in America?

  Limón: I think that there is some idea that poetry only exists in the academic world or in the ivory tower, if you will. But I always grew up in a community where poetry was being read, where at the local bookstore there were always poetry readings, at the local bars there were poetry slams. And I think sometimes we forget about that, there are many different ways to experience a poem. And poems travel one poem at a time. It's not always about reading a book. It is reading one poem. They move through the world individually. And I think that's a real beauty and a real power to poetry, is that it can often only take 2 minutes to read it and yet it can transform that moment, that hour and sometimes that life.

  Kelly: Your signature project is called You Are Here. Part of this was actually doing something very small and specific, like you actually put poems on picnic tables. Tell me what it looked like.

  U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón unveils a poetry installation on a picnic table at Mount Rainier National Park in June 2024.
  U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón unveils a poetry installation on a picnic table at Mount Rainier National Park in June 2024.

  Library of Congress
  Limón: Oh, yeah. Thank you so much for bringing it up. I worked with the Poetry Society of America to choose poems that would fit for each of the seven parks that we had the beautiful opportunity to work with. And those poems are on those picnic tables.

  So you sit at the picnic table, you read the poem and then you're in this really wondrous, beautiful area. And then each of the tables also includes a prompt that just says, "What would you write to the landscape around you?" So, that it's not just the experience of reading the poem and gathering around the poem and gathering in a beautiful area, but also thinking about how you might write something back to the world. And I wanted to do that so that we could remember that the relationship with our landscapes is reciprocal.

  Sponsor Message

  Kelly: I want to ask about creating poetry in this moment. We are living in a moment where President Trump has taken on some of the great cultural pillars of our country. He has installed himself as chairman of the Kennedy Center. He has issued executive orders to force changes at the Smithsonian. How do you think about creating art, about creating poetry in this moment?

  Limón: You know, I was just speaking to a former poet laureate and I was thinking about how in the role, a lot of what you do is talk about poetry and the importance of poetry. And then there's a moment where you're in your kitchen, you're listening to the news and you think, "Does it matter? ...

  Does it really matter to write a poem?" When what we need is so huge, what we need is so monumental. The collective action that is required in this moment.

  And then you think, "What if poetry can bring you back to wonder, to kindness, to care, to sensitivity, to tenderness?" And even in that small moment, isn't that a radical act? Isn't that saving yourself so that you can become stronger? So that you can become braver? And that's where I am right now. I'm writing toward bravery. I'm writing toward courage. And I think that there's a lot of us that are doing that right now. And I think it's the way we are preparing ourselves for what's next, in many ways, not only what is coming, but what we will bring to the future.

  This story was adapted for the web by Manuela López Restrepo and edited by Karen Zamora.

• Alta - https://www.altaonline.com/california-book-club/a65881023/ada-limon-why-i-write-california-essay/

  Why I Write: Toward Belonging
  From her California hometown, Ada Limón reflects on poetry, memory, and belonging—writing as a way to connect, to remember, and to truly exist.

  By Ada Limón and Photo by Carolyn FongPublished: Sep 19, 2025
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  poet ada limón sits on a desk in front of bookshelves in her california home, smiling in a floral blouse, sunlight glowing through the window behind her.
  Carolyn Fong
  After nearly 30 years, I’ve recently moved back to my home valley in California. I should say, not just my home valley, but my hometown, and not just my hometown, but the house that I grew up in, from ages six months to 15 years. Memory has, to say the least, become all the more surreal. I’ve turned my childhood bedroom into my office, and it’s where I’m writing this now. Time has shifted. It’s both horizontal and vertical.

  Over the past 25 years, I’ve written at least 100 poems about this valley, this place, and now it feels as if I am living inside my own poems. Here’s Dunbar Road, and Henno Road, and here is my secret creek, my first most beloved tree, and here is where the fire started, and here is where the fire went out. Where I used to point to pages, I can now point, in real time, to the places that made me. This might be the very definition of the lyrical present. The poem has happened but is also happening now.

  This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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  Recently, after a short but dramatic bout with rattlesnakes on our small hillside plot, the local snake guy, James, wearing high leather boots I later learned are actually called snake boots, was in the crawl space in the garage. As he was under there looking for signs of snakes, I made the mistake of shouting, “Oh my god.”

  He slowly removed himself from the crawl space and said, in the serious low tone of someone ready to spring into action, “What?” I had discovered my name written in my own handwriting in the cement floor of the garage: ADA 1983. I was delighted.

  In hindsight, one should probably never shout “Oh my god” while someone is looking for rattlesnakes. But I remembered writing it in the wet cement when my grandpa and my dad finished the second-floor addition. I had been looking for it ever since we moved in. I would have been seven years old. I’d thought one of the previous owners had undoubtedly paved over it. But here it was: evidence.

  Did I write my name to be remembered? Did I write my name as a way of owning this specific place? I don’t think so. I think, even then, I wrote my name as a way of belonging. As a way of hoping I belonged to this land, this world, to this time, to this now, as a way of knowing I existed at all. I am always figuring out how to exist, and writing, poetry in particular, is one of the few things that offer proof that I am here. I write toward reciprocity, toward connection, toward offering something back to this wondrous suffering planet. Writing is a way of saying, Yes, I am here, but also we are here together, all of us, how rare, how miraculous, how awful, how utterly strange.

  I remember sitting by the low stone wall behind the house and learning from my mother how to sketch the stones, how they existed in shadows. If I look now, I can see myself then trying to study as hard as I could to see how the world was made: shadows, light, green and growing things, the seasonal creek filling and drying up over and over. I didn’t know yet that the world was full of violence and cruelty that would seem sometimes unstoppable, but I knew I wanted to find a way to remember as much of this life as I could. I write to know the world and, in turn, be known by the world itself, which is of course ridiculous and impossible.

  I write to know I am a part of this time, this particular ecosystem, these old valley oaks, these dark-eyed juncos. I write to say thank you and to say I’m sorry and to say I don’t want to miss any of this life, and always to say I love you, I miss you, I love you. I write because we die, and because that is something I have never gotten over. I write to remember because not only do I want to hold on to this life, to everything I love, but I want to behold it, wholly.

  I write to receive and to notice the receiving. I write to cast a protection spell. I write toward joy because joy is rebellious. I write toward rage because rage can fuel action. I write because, no matter who thinks they are in charge of our bodies, we all have the right to scratch our own names in the dirt, to know that we belong.•

• San Francisco Chronicle - https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/ada-limon-sonoma-startlement-20819855.php

  Sonoma poet Ada Limón’s words are headed to Jupiter. She says the real wonder is here on Earth
  By Jessica Zack,
  Contributor
  Sep 19, 2025
  Sonoma native and former U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón holds a copy of her new book of poems, “Startlement.”
  Sonoma native and former U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón holds a copy of her new book of poems, “Startlement.”

  Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle

  Poet Ada Limón has seen her work travel farther than most.

  Among her other accomplishments, the Sonoma native was U.S. poet laureate from the fall of 2022 to April 2025 and has received countless awards and honors, including a MacArthur “genius” fellowship and in 2024 being named one of Time magazine’s women of the year.

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  More Information
  Startlement: New and Selected Poems
  By Ada Limón
  (Milkweed Editions; 232 pages; $28)

  “Startlement” book launch event with Ada Limón: 6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 30. Free. Readers’ Books, 276 East Napa St., Sonoma. www.readersbooks.com

  Litquake presents Ada Limón, in conversation with poet Matthew Zapruder: 7:30-9 p.m. Oct. 11. $20 advance; $25 door. Swedish American Hall, 2174 Market St., S.F. www.litquake.org

  See More
  Her poem, “In Praise of Mystery,” is engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft and is currently en route to Jupiter’s second moon.

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  In a recent interview with the Chronicle to discuss her radiant new book out Sept. 30, titled “Startlement: New and Selected Poems,” which includes more than 20 new poems, Limón described the awe she feels when she goes outside on clear Sonoma nights to view the stars.

  It’s not just amazement that her creative work is out there somewhere in orbit. Rather, in those moments, Limón is reminded that poetry itself can open people up to a deeper engagement with nature, and with each other.

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  “The wonder isn’t just out there,” she said. “It’s right here.”

  This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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  Q: There’s a palpable feeling in your work of connectedness to nature. Did growing up in Sonoma help you develop that?

  A: Absolutely. This valley raised me to be very in tune to the natural world. I had teachers and mentors who were naturalists, who worked at protecting (the environment) and taught me all about the natural world. One of the things that makes this place so special is that people recognize its beauty and they bear witness to it on a regular basis.

  “Startlement: New and Selected Poems” by Ada Limón includes more than 20 new poems.
  “Startlement: New and Selected Poems” by Ada Limón includes more than 20 new poems.

  Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
  Q: Your poetry is filled with trees, plants, birds and fish, and yet one thing that makes it so special is that you’re just as attuned to your internal emotional landscape as you are to what’s outside.

  A: There’s a big part of me that feels connected to the natural world, to the planet itself, to the idea that all the different elements that make me a body, and a creek a body of water, are connected. I feel like in order to know myself and to know my inner workings, I also have to know the outer workings of the world’s natural places. They’re woven together. One doesn’t really exist without the other.

  I think I was well aware of that as a young person. I never understood how you could look at a tree and not think of it as being a life, or how so much separateness was built into our societal systems. It took me a long time to agree to pretend in what I call the illusion of separateness.

  Q: As you traveled around the country as U.S. poet laureate, did anything surprise you about the ways people connect with poetry, or don’t?

  A: I was surprised by how many people love poems and poetry. I think there’s a misconception that not many people care about poetry, and I understand that. We don’t see it on the global stage that often. We don’t have the Academy Awards of poetry, but poetry felt more alive to me than ever while I was serving in that role. People were fiercely interested in what it means to have a poem that you love and yet you can’t really explain it. You can’t describe it, but you know that it moves you deeply.

  Q: Do you think people need to connect with poetry, with art, just for the experience even more right now, when the world and news can feel so tumultuous?

  A: Yes. Reading poetry feels especially satisfying right now. We’re in this moment in which it feels difficult to trust language, whether it’s the rhetoric of politicians, or AI-generated language. Poetry offers us a deep humanness.

  I’ve been turning to poetry more and more. That might sound funny since you might think I read poetry all the time, but I have found that when I’m struggling and trying to find my footing in this reality that we all are living in, poetry is the thing that makes the most sense to me. It feels the best in my body and mind right now.

  Ada Limón, two-time U.S. poet laureate, holds “Startlement: New and Selected Poems,” set for release on Tuesday, Sept. 30.
  Ada Limón, two-time U.S. poet laureate, holds “Startlement: New and Selected Poems,” set for release on Tuesday, Sept. 30.

  Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
  Q: The position of poet laureate is apolitical, but in your calls for environmental awareness, is your work political?

  A: Some people make the argument that all poetry is political or dangerous on some level.

  Q: Dangerous?

  A: Well, art making allows us to remember that we have a soul, that we have compassion, empathy and a full spectrum of human emotions beyond material needs, beyond capitalism. When you write or read poems, you can’t help but look closely at what does matter. And when you do that, it’s very hard not to see the inhumanity and the cruelty that is happening in our country right now.

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  Q: How does it feel to know your poem “In Praise of Mystery” is engraved on a spacecraft headed to Jupiter?

  A: I do think about it when I look up at the stars. It is amazing, but the biggest thing for me is that the poem itself is for this planet. It’s for us here. It’s for everyone who looks up at the stars and thinks the wonder is out there. It’s not. There is wonder out there, but it’s also right here.

  Jessica Zack is a freelance writer.

  Sep 19, 2025

• Tricycle - https://tricycle.org/article/ada-limon-interview/?utm_campaign=&utm_source=p3s4h3r3s

  Decentering the Self
  US Poet Laureate Ada Limón discusses the transformative power of wonder and awe.

  Ada Limón in conversation with James Shaheen and Sharon Salzberg Sep 30, 2025
  Decentering the Self
  Photo by Ayna Lorenzo courtesy MacArthur Foundation
  For US Poet Laureate Ada Limón, the task of the poet is to look—and keep looking. “There’s sometimes a misconception that poetry only deals with self and autobiography,” she told Tricycle. “But if you spend your life devoted to noticing and to looking, your sense of self begins to dissolve, because you’re looking outward, and then you recognize that things are looking back at you.”

  Limón’s latest book, Startlement: New and Selected Poems, takes up this theme of witnessing and being witnessed, with a particular attention to how poetry can help foster greater awareness of our interconnectedness with the natural world. Bringing together nearly twenty years of Limón’s work, the collection traces what Limón calls “the original questions, the original curiosities” that keep coming up in her life and her practice.

  In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Limón to discuss how poetry can help us decenter ourselves, her daily practice of loving-kindness, and how startlement can be a spiritual practice. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, along with three poems from Limón’s new collection.

  James Shaheen (JS): Your new book is called Startlement, and the last time you were on the podcast, you talked about what it means to be creatures of constant awe. It seems like wonder and awe are recurring themes in your work. Do you think about startlement as a spiritual or meditative practice?

  Ada Limón (AL): I do. I love to be amazed, and it’s easy to be. Life is really weird, and I don’t understand why we don’t talk about that enough. I think it’s because we don’t have the capacity to talk about all the strangeness all the time. But I am bewildered by existence on a regular minute-by-minute basis. I mean, we’re animals that wear clothes. That’s bizarre. So startlement is really just a way of naming amazement and bewilderment. I also started thinking of it as a collective noun. You know how we have collective nouns for birds, like a murmuration of starlings or a murder of crows or a rafter of turkeys? I kept thinking of the book as a startlement of poems.

  JS: The last time you were on the podcast, you talked about what first brought you to spiritual practice, and you mentioned going to classes with Sharon at Tibet House. Now that Sharon is joining us, can you tell us about that experience again? How does loving-kindness influence your approach to poetry?

  AL: At the risk of embarrassing you, Sharon, I’ll just say you changed my life. You continue to change my life. You’re with me daily. Loving-kindness is still the main meditation that I go to. I do it every day. When I first started meditating, I was desperate to find something, and I looked up and saw you were teaching at the Tibet House. I went for the free classes there, and it just became a practice. In fact, I brought my teacher, Marie Howe, there once, and we practiced together.

  One of the great lessons I took away from your teaching was the idea of having some humor as you practice. As you taught, you had so much humor and humanity that I really related to the way you approached the practice, and it allowed for such a welcoming doorway that I could walk through. I’m still so grateful to you and your work and the way you brought loving-kindness into my world and continue to do so for many people. It’s still my main practice.

  Sharon Salzberg (SS): Thank you so much. That’s really beautiful, and you’re inspiring me at this moment. One of the themes that emerges in this collection is an awareness of our interconnectedness with all beings, which is certainly something that a loving-kindness practice can bring attention to. So how can poetry cultivate greater awareness of interdependence?

  AL: I think poetry, at its core, is about paying attention. When you’re deeply looking at something, you’re loving it. And I think that when you do that, whether it’s with a person or a nonhuman animal or a plant or a tree, it is a way of witnessing and being witnessed and recognizing that we are in this together.

  It’s so strange to me that we feel alone. It’s a common feeling, and sometimes I feel so isolated in a particular emotion. But then if you really look around you, there’s no way to be alone. We are on this planet together—I mean, really together. And my work is always interested in that. That is a curiosity that comes up a lot, which is how can we constantly feel isolated when without a doubt we are working and living in tandem with all living beings.

  As poets, that’s our job: to look, to notice, to witness, and to find language for it—and to recognize where language fails.

  SS: Right, in one of your poems, you write, “We know now, / we were never at the circle’s center.” So how can poetry help us to decenter ourselves and notice all the other life forms living alongside us?

  AL: You know, there’s sometimes a misconception that poetry only deals with self and autobiography, and it’s just about the artist’s gaze. But if you spend your life devoted to noticing and to looking, your sense of self begins to dissolve because you’re looking outward, and then you recognize that things are looking back at you, right? There’s the whole idea that birds notice us way before we notice them. They’ve been looking at us this whole time, and then we go, “Oh look, a bird.” I feel like recognizing that comes so naturally once you really start to pay attention. As poets, that’s our job: to look, to notice, to witness, and to find language for it—and to recognize where language fails.

  I think that the practice of poetry is not unlike meditation, where it allows us to recognize that we’re not at the story’s center. You know, we’re not the hero. We’re part of a journey, and so many people are on that journey. And for me, there’s a surrender there that I resisted when I was younger. It gets easier as I age.

  I was just thinking in the shower this morning, “Oh, I need some new clothes, because I’m going to go on book tour.” And then I said, “Well, maybe it’s not my clothes that are the problem. Maybe it’s my body.” And then my mind said, “Or maybe the body’s not the problem. Maybe it’s your mind.” And then of course I started laughing. And I do think that the more you pay attention to your own thoughts, the more absurd it all seems. Just like you have always done in your teachings, Sharon, you have a sense of humor about it. So I think that paying attention offers us much more than we think—it turns out it really helps.

  JS: You mentioned Marie Howe, and she talks about how writing poetry is a way of opening up space to listen to the natural world. I wonder if that resonates with your experience as a writer.

  AL: Yeah, what an exceptional teacher and poet and human being. I think that opening up to the natural world is the idea that we are nature. Sometimes my initial reaction to the natural world is to name and identify. In first grade, we had to sit in a little square outside, and we had to describe all the things that we could name: the types of plants, the types of bugs, everything we saw in this little square. And so sometimes I have that relationship, where I go, What’s this? What is the name of this? I need to know it. And then there are times where I am having an experience where I don’t want to know the name that we’ve given it; I want to see if the plant tells me its name. Or I don’t even want to have anything to do with language; I just want to have an experience with this creek, and I just want to be part of it. And so I think that poetry is that doorway, because even though we value language as this signifier and we value image and metaphor and symbols, poetry really recognizes where language fails, where it falls apart. And that’s where the breath is, right? That’s the line breaks and the caesuras and the stanzas. That’s where we breathe. And that’s that place where we don’t have the language for it. There’s so much of my experience with nature that goes beyond words, and poetry makes space for that.

  JS: Right, your poems explore the limits of language, and you mentioned how language can sometimes get between us and what is. So can you say more about how poetry can press against the limits of language?

  AL: Yeah, I think because in many ways poetry is music, right? It’s sonic; it’s lyrical. Often, when we can’t get at an image with the exactness of language, we can produce music that is paying homage to the memory or the idea or thought or thread that the poem is representing. And so the music becomes equally as important, and the words sometimes aren’t necessarily the thing, but it’s the hearing. It’s that musicality. When we let go of language and its meaning, we are leaning into the sonics and the songlike quality of poetry.

  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

  Startlement

  It is a forgotten pleasure, the pleasure
  of the unexpected blue-bellied lizard

  skittering off his sun spot rock, the flicker
  of an unknown bird by the bus stop.

  To think, perhaps, we are not distinguishable
  and therefore no loneliness can exist here.

  Species to species in the same blue air, smoke—
  wing flutter buzzing, a car horn coming.

  So many unknown languages, to think we have
  only honored this strange human tongue.

  If you sit by the riverside, you see a culmination
  of all things upstream. We know now,

  we were never at the circle’s center, instead
  all around us something is living or trying to live.

  The world says, What we are becoming, we are
  becoming together.

  The world says, One type of dream has ended
  and another has just begun.

  The world says, Once we were separate,
  and now we must move in unison.

  The Endlessness

  At first I was lonely, but then I was
  curious. The original fault was that I could
  not see the lines of things. My mother could.
  She could see shapes and lines and shadows,
  but all I could see was memory, what had been
  done to the object before it was placed on
  the coffee table or the nightstand. I could sense
  that it had a life underneath it. Because
  of this, I thought I was perhaps bad at seeing. Even
  color was not color, but a mood. The lamp was
  sullen, a candlestick brooding and rude with its old
  wax crumbling at its edges, not flame, not a promise
  of flame. How was I supposed to feel then? About
  moving in the world? How could I touch anything
  or anyone without the weight of all of time shifting
  through us? I was not, or I did not think I was, making
  up stories; it was how the world was, or rather it is how
  the world is. I’ve only now become better at pretending
  that there are edges, boundaries, that if I touch
  something it cannot always touch me back.

  Literary Theory

  Somehow the word
  allow is in the word
  swallow and in swallow
  two wholly different meanings:
  one to take in through
  the mouth and another
  what we call the common
  winged gnat hunter who
  is, in all probability,
  somewhere near us now.
  Once, I thought
  if I knew all the words
  I would say the right thing
  in the right way,
  instead language becomes
  more brutish: blink twice
  for the bird, blink once
  for tender annihilation. Who
  knows what we are doing as
  we go about our days lazily
  choosing our languages. Some
  days my life is held together
  by definitions, some days
  I read the word swallow
  and all my feathers show.

  ♦

  “Startlement,” “The Endlessness,” and “Literary Theory” from Startlement: New and Selected Poems (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2025). Copyright © 2025 by Ada Limón. Reprinted with the permission of Milkweed Editions, milkweed.org.

  Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States.
  James Shaheen is Tricycle’s editor-in-chief.
  Sharon Salzberg is a founding teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. Her latest book is Real Life: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom. She teaches the Tricycle online courses The Whole Path, Real Love, and The Boundless Heart.

• NPR - https://www.npr.org/2024/05/23/1244130906/poet-laureate-ada-limon-ghosts-premonitions-forgiving-yourself

  Ada Limón couldn't get pregnant, then realized: 'What if my body was only my body?'
  Updated May 26, 20247:15 AM ET
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  Transcript

  Ada Limón says she was swimming in Chesapeake Bay when she had a moment of feeling, "What if my body was only my body?"

  Lucas Marquardt
  A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: I went looking for a few lines that could attempt to represent the whole of U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón's work. I don't think I succeeded because her poems are so full and touch on so much – from the natural world to very personal longing. But I think this gets close:

  Look, we are not unspectacular things.
  We've come this far, survived this much. What

  would happen if we decided to survive more, to love harder?

  This is a line from the poem Dead Stars and I love it because here you see her acknowledge the hard stuff of living, but it's embedded in perseverance and optimism.

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  "What would happen if we decided to survive more, to love harder?" I read that and I'm like, "Yes Ada. I'm all in. Let's at least try, right?" She is urging us to keep going and it's not a prescription from on high, she's right here with us reaching for another day.

  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, and I love that space.

  Writing from that space is one thing — talking from there is quite another, which is why I was moved when Ada used one of the questions in our game to talk about something incredibly personal. And in her story you'll hear echoes of that same line of poetry: "What would happen if we decided to survive more, to love harder?"

  I spoke to Ada just before the publication of You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a collection of poems she edited and introduced, featuring the work of Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Jericho Brown and more.

  This Wild Card interview has been edited for length and clarity. Host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly-selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.

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  Question 1: What's a smell that brings back a vivid memory for you?
  Ada Limón: My grandfather and grandmother on my mother's side made dueling types of fudge. My grandfather's was a hard sort of old-fashioned kind of fudge and my grandmother's was a soft fudge like See's Candy.

  My favorite thing was to go into their walk-in cupboard, and they would have all of their Tupperware full of their different kinds of fudge for guests and things. And you could smell it. You couldn't reach it, unfortunately, but you could smell it.

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  Wild Card with Rachel Martin
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  Rachel Martin: Did you spend a lot of time with them growing up?

  Limón: I did, yes. And my grandmother just died last August and she's been on my mind a lot. So I think that she's with me in my heart.

  Martin: Was she a lover of poetry?

  Limón: She did like poetry, although she was very confused that not all my poems rhymed. I told her that some of them do. And when my grandfather passed away, she asked me to write a poem for him and I made it rhyme.

  Question 2: When's the last time you forgave yourself for something?
  Limón: This morning. I've been traveling a lot and it's been beautiful. And this morning I was doing yoga, which I try to do every morning, and I was just very stiff. I felt like I hadn't been moving as much as I should and I was very hard on myself. And then I told myself, "You were doing amazing things. You were doing other things that mattered and it's OK."

  I think it's very important because early on I thought all of self care was really more self punishing.

  Martin: What does that mean?

  Limón: Oh, I just felt like if I miss a day of working out, or if I feast too much and enjoy too much, I'll have to go into...

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  Martin: Deprivation mode.

  Limón:. Yes, exactly. And I just don't do that anymore. I think that's been really healthy for me because I feel like you spend a lot of your twenties and thirties, at least for me, trying to do everything right. And the nice thing about being in my mid-to-late forties is that I forgive myself all the time. I have to.

  Question 3: Have you ever had a premonition about something that came true?
  Limón: I think that I knew that we weren't going to be able to conceive a child before we decided to give up on fertility treatments. I think I knew that. And I think it actually helped me to make some decisions to not move forward with any more of the treatments.

  It felt like my body knew something and it was able to offer me another option and another future. And it felt like, OK, now what else is possible? Because I think as women in our culture, the only possibility oftentimes offered to us is motherhood.

  Why Jenny Slate sometimes feels like a 'terminal optimist'
  Wild Card with Rachel Martin
  Why Jenny Slate sometimes feels like a 'terminal optimist'
  Martin: That's right.

  Limón: I felt very bound by that and letting that go was really freeing. And I love my life and I love being child-free. And I think that premonition offered that.

  Martin: Did you have a specific dream, or was it just a knowing in your bones?

  Limón: I was floating in the Chesapeake Bay and I just had this moment of feeling, "What if my body was only my body?" And it felt really powerful. What if it didn't belong to anyone else? And it was just mine.

  Martin: We never talk about it that way.

  Limón: I had never felt it that way. All I wanted was to carry something in me — a baby, a child. And then it was so freeing. And I got out of the ocean, I remember thinking, "That was beautiful." Like, what if I'm enough? What if just my body, what if these boundaries and these borders of my skin touching the water, was enough?

• Guernica - https://www.guernicamag.com/back-draft-ada-limon/

  July 18, 2022
  Back Draft: Ada Limón
  The new US poet laureate discusses the myth of individualism, the climate crisis, and what makes a “core poem.”
  By Ada Limón and Ben Purkert
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  JuxtaposeJS
  There’s no shortage of poems about nature — pastorals that capture the beauty of landscapes, odes that pay tribute to the passage of the seasons. Less common, however, are poems that embody the dark heart of the wilderness, leading us toward both what blossoms and what decays.

  In “Thorns,” a poem from Ada Limón’s newest collection, The Hurting Kind, the speaker encounters death and abruptly turns away. It’s a memory from early childhood, yet it has none of the dusty quality of remembrance; the narrative is as sharp as any fresh jolt of pain. It’s the kind of poem for which Limón has become famous, with clear storytelling, vivid visuals, and a final turn that snaps you like a twig.

  On July 12, 2022, Limón was named the twenty-fourth poet laureate of the United States. When I spoke with her over the phone a few weeks earlier, she was sitting at home in Lexington, Kentucky. It was the start of spring, and perennials had begun sprouting from the soil. Looking out the window, she described to me what was already growing, though it was early in the season and, she noted, there was still much to come.

  — Ben Purkert for Guernica

  Guernica: What does the process of starting a poem look like for you?

  Ada Limón: Typically it begins with an obsession. Something that keeps returning to me, whether it’s a sound, or an image, or an idea, or even just one word. Then I’ll start to unravel it, or simply pull at the thread and see what happens. In this case, it was the image of the dead goose, and the fact that we walked away after seeing it, going about our day — that decision to carry on and pick blackberries, in spite of what we’d just observed.

  When my friend’s mother found us later, she admonished us. Not about the goose, just for picking too many berries. She kept saying, “What am I going to do with them all?” And so we made a bunch of pies, so the berries wouldn’t go to waste. But those two threads, and their intersection, that’s what interested me — the singular death of the goose, contrasted with the plentitude of the berries.

  Guernica: What led you to change the poem’s title? Why “Thorns”?

  Limón: Well, originally I’d thought about the poem in terms of a kind of plundering. But then I realized, through revision, that the poem is making a statement about throwing yourself wildly into abundance, into joy. That need to survive, to taste, to witness, to experience pleasure. To resist the fact of your own mortality. And it seemed to me that the thorns on berries function somewhat like armor. They keep us aware of pain and death, but at the same time, they sharpen our attention to our own living.

  It’s a poem about youth, ultimately. We were so young at the time. We didn’t know. We thought to ourselves, There’s been a death, so let’s celebrate. Let’s live even harder. And we don’t care if we get pricked or hurt or come home bloody.

  Guernica: It’s interesting to me that you don’t return to the goose at the end, though there’s a subtle allusion with that last word, “good.” An echo, almost.

  Limón: Yes. And I wanted the double meaning of “for good” there — as in good intentions, but also perpetuity.

  Guernica: One part of the poem that you edited significantly is the description of the berry-picking. Can you speak to that decision?

  Limón: That was a suggestion from my stepfather, Brady. I send almost all my first drafts to him. He’s been helping me edit since I was nine. Anyway, we worked together on this revision, and he felt there was a bit of redundancy in there. So I heard his feedback and then I looked at it. And he was right.

  Guernica: How did your stepfather become one of your early readers?

  Limón: He was someone who took my creativity really seriously, even when I was a child. I’d walk into his office and say, “Do you want to read this?” And he’d stop what he was doing and say, “Yeah, sure.” I think that’s rare, to be taken seriously as an artist at that age. It was our bond. It is our bond. And I’ve always trusted him with the work. I will say, however, that he’s the kind of editor who leans toward spareness. He was a short-story writer, and he’s always had an interest in being clean and concise. I push against that, and I get weird, and I love that about myself; I can be abundant and generous in my lyrics. Sometimes he can rein me in when I’m going too far, and sometimes I don’t listen to him at all. We’re a good balance.

  Guernica: I love that. I feel like we writers often think that the perfect editor is one who shares our sensibility when, in fact, what we really need is a smart reader who reads in a different way from us.

  Limón: That’s very true. And another common misconception, I think, is that we writers work alone. That’s one of the reasons I was excited to talk about this poem specifically — because this is what revision looks like. It’s collaborative. We send drafts to friends. We send drafts to readers, and they nudge us and carry us toward completion. I think this idea of the totally isolated artist is a false one. Especially for poets.

  Guernica: Where does this emphasis on isolation come from? Why do we fetishize the singular artist in this way?

  Limón: I think it’s related to the myth of individualism, this notion that we’re not all connected — that some people are unique, and because of their uniqueness they do incredible things. Our interconnectedness is really important. If we think about our writing teachers and workshops, it’s all about community. And when you bring work to a workshop and people don’t really understand it, there’s still something communal that’s taking place, even if it causes you to double down and say to yourself, “You know what? I’m going to make my work even weirder.” I’m just very suspicious of the idea of writing poems in a lonely tower.

  Guernica: This makes me think of the project you did with poet Natalie Díaz a few years ago. I remember reading it at the time, thinking to myself that there really aren’t many poets doing collaborative work like this. But in fact, poets are doing it; it’s simply harder to get published, to make visible, etc.

  Limón: Right. And, to be clear, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with valuing an artist as an individual. But I do think there’s something off-center about not giving credence to the community of artists that surrounds the artist, or the community of people and non-artists and family and friends who are helping them live — the people you call when you want to grab a cocktail or sip tea together one afternoon. That’s part of what makes poetry possible, too.

  Guernica: How fitting, then, that this poem features friendship, among other things.

  Limón: Yes! The other girl in the poem was actually my best friend growing up. I have so many memories of her from childhood. But in this poem, I knew I couldn’t go too deep into all that.

  Guernica: Why not?

  Limón: I’m the kind of poet who’s easily distracted. I’m basically a magpie for sounds and images. As soon as something comes up that interests me, I think to myself, “Ooh! Let’s go there.” But, at times, I need to resist that impulse. I remember, I once received this wonderful piece of advice from the poet Catherine Esposito Prescott in a workshop at New York University. She said, “You always want to get off the porch really fast. Maybe you should try staying on the porch?” And I think about that all the time because it’s true. I do need to stay put sometimes. Of course, I love to wander and be expansive and all that, but focus is important.

  Guernica: It’s funny that you mention magpies, because I wanted to touch on the subject of animals. Your poems are so often suffused with wildlife. In The Hurting Kind, as opposed to your other collections, it feels like the balance has shifted more toward flora than fauna. Do you agree?

  Limón: While writing these poems, I was very focused on the trees around me. I think that was a function of the pandemic: being off the road, spending more time in my neighborhood. I would walk the dog and notice how the trees changed from month to month, and it made me feel like I was part of a community, or even a sense of belonging. Anyway, the trees became as present in my poems as animals, or at least they appeared at the same horizon, so that everything came in the same light.

  Guernica: I’ve heard that you’re a gardener. When you’re working in the yard with your hands in the soil, are you seeking this sense of belonging?

  Limón: I’m more of a planter than a gardener. I just like to throw seeds in the ground and see what happens. For me, it’s really connected to the idea of appreciating the movement of time. So often, we think about time in terms of a week or a semester. We choose to value it in a certain way, then we anchor it in increments. But the passage of time, as seen in a garden, is so much more real. Like, right now, as I’m talking to you, I’m looking out my window. There are hollyhocks coming up that weren’t there yesterday. Columbine just started coming up, too. This is the only kind of time I trust. Do I sound unhinged?

  Guernica: Not at all! I live in Jersey City, and there’s very little green space here. I really miss seeing things grow in the way you describe.

  It’s sad, but as you were talking about nature and time, I started thinking about the Jorie Graham poem “Embodies” (“Deep autumn & the mistake occurs, the plum tree blossoms”), and that really chilling way in which climate change wreaks havoc on certain growing seasons. Maybe I shouldn’t go there —

  Limón: It’s not a question of going there. We already are there.

  Writing this book, I had the climate crisis on my mind a lot, and I’m sure it’s on yours as well. I don’t know how we live without thinking about it. But what I most worry about is giving up. Sometimes it seems like we resign ourselves to apocalypse. This idea of hellfire, and everything being in collapse. But then I look around, as I’m looking right now, and I see that a house finch is making a nest in one of my hanging ferns. What I’m saying is, I’m going to appreciate this time. And I intend to fight for this Earth, and will vote for officials who fight for it. If we become too despairing about this crisis, we start to feel alienated from our own planet. That’s where the real danger lies.

  Guernica: You were talking earlier about the passage of time, and I was struck by how powerfully you write about aging in this book. One of the most vulnerable lines in The Hurting Kind is, “I will never be a mother.” It’s remarkable how you, or rather the speaker of the poem —

  Limón: It’s me. In this book, it’s all me.

  Guernica: Can you talk about the book within the context of aging? By aging, I simply mean moving through time.

  Limón: Aging meaning living.

  Guernica: Exactly.

  Limón: One of the reasons for the book’s organization is that I’m really interested in ongoingness. I didn’t want to create a book that had a narrative arc. I’ve done that before, and it can be a beautiful way to shape a book, but I needed something that felt less self-contained. The kind of book where, when you finish, it feels like you could begin again — like spring turns to summer, then to fall, then to winter, then back to spring. No beginning, middle, and end. Rather, a cycle.

  Guernica: Do you think we poets have invested too much in this idea of shaping a poetry collection around an arc?

  Limón: No, I don’t think so. There was a thread on Twitter the other day in which someone was lamenting that there aren’t just collections of random poems anymore. As someone who reads many poetry books, I wanted to say, “Excuse me, but that is still happening!” Everything is still happening. So many artists are out there doing so many different things.

  When I’m organizing a poetry book, I always want two things to happen. First, I really need to love it, regardless of current trends or chatter. Second, I want the book to really highlight each individual poem. I want to make sure that, whatever the order is, whatever the organizing principle is, that each poem gets enough light, so that it can be seen.

  Guernica: I often think about the fact that workshops tend not to prepare poets for ordering a manuscript. Workshops are geared at developing and polishing an individual poem. But when it comes to placing that polished poem in community with other poems, it’s a foreign process.

  Limón: Yes. And there’s another issue: we often talk about manuscript ordering only in terms of cutting. You should give yourself permission to add! If you just wrote your very favorite poem, it should go in the book, even if you only wrote it yesterday. Sometimes we’re afraid to fill out a book, when that’s exactly what it needs.

  Guernica: Can I ask — logistically speaking, what does ordering look like for you? Sometimes you’ll see photos of poets in residencies printing out their poems and then taping them to the wall, rearranging them that way, anything to move them physically around. Do you do something similar?

  Limón: I don’t always print them out. Sometimes I do. Typically I’ll start with a list of twenty poems that are the core. With that, I then think about what goes around those poems. That’s how it gets built — from the inside out. The core poems are the skeleton. Then I beautify the skeleton.

  Guernica: What constitutes a core poem?

  Limón: It’s a poem that’s taught me something, something that surprised me — the kind of poem where, if an editor asked for a submission tonight, it would be included. Or that I would choose if I was asked to give a reading, and I had to choose immediately what to bring to the podium. It’s the poem that most excites me, but also scares me a little. Those are the core poems, because they’re really alive.

  Read more interviews from our Back Draft archive.

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  Ada Limón
  Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California, and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky, where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically acclaimed poetry podcast The Slowdown. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is out now from Milkweed Editions. She is the twenty-fourth poet laureate of the United States.

• University of Washington - https://magazine.washington.edu/feature/the-poet-laureate-ada-limon-still-holds-the-uw-in-her-heart/#gsc.tab=0

  The Poet Laureate
  Ada Limón, the United States' official poet, still holds the UW in her heart

  By Chris Talbott | Photos courtesy of the Library of Congress | September 2022

  UW Magazine Facebook @UWalum @UWalum Jump To Comments
  In July, Ada Limón was caught by surprise. The School of Drama graduate had a growing fan base for her effervescent poetry, had so far published six celebrated volumes and had won a National Book Award. But she had no idea she was on the cusp of being named U.S. Poet Laureate.

  In the first weeks after the announcement, she was so inundated with interview requests, she had to take a pause. “It is a very weird thing,” Limón says. “I will say that you do not go into poetry for the fame or the money. So that there are people who recognize who I am, that recognize my work and my words, is really extraordinary on many different levels.”

  Luckily Limón, ’98, came out of her media timeout to share insight into her art and her pivotal time at the UW.

  What is essential to a great poem?
  Really great poems can surprise us and move us in unexpected ways. A great poem often has the perfect combination of music, story and emotional content. So it’s matching all three of those things all at once, and they come together in a harmonious way that feels sort of indescribable. You can’t figure out what it is that you love about it, but somehow you’re moved to tears or you’re moved to laugh or you’re suddenly, like, “Oh, I feel more in my body,” or, “I feel more connected to the world.” There’s some sort of indescribable moment or experience that the reader goes through, and it’s usually because those three things are working together, and in ways that are surprising. I feel like the best poems can really change a whole day. And sometimes they can change your whole life.

  How has the news and the response changed things for you?
  It’s a sort of a balancing act of protecting that artist in me that just wants to sit in my PJs and write poems. You know, pet the cat and the dog and weep a little and read a poem. And then there’s part of me that wants to go out there and help to spread the message of poetry, to elevate poetry, to really help others recognize that it’s a tool we can use to help heal ourselves, especially right now when we need so much healing.

  What did you take away from your time at the UW?
  The UW is very much in my heart. One of the things that was really important to me was that I didn’t know quite how to find my footing at the University to start because, as you know, it’s enormous and I’m from a small town—Sonoma, California. The population of the UW is bigger than my hometown. I had to figure out where I fit. And I found the artists. That was my first experience in my life where it was like, oh, seek out the creative people and then you will find your community, and that’s what I did. And the UW is such a wonderful mix of different artists. I took almost every dance class you could take. I have a degree in theater. I took all the classes that you could take in the theater department, including sound design. And then, really, I was running out of electives inside those two departments, and they sort of pushed me out. They were like, “You need to go somewhere else and to take something else and be more well-rounded,” and that’s when I found creative writing.

  Lover
  By Ada Limón

  Easy light storms in through the window, soft
  edges of the world, smudged by mist, a squirrel’s

  nest rigged high in the maple. I’ve got a bone
  to pick with whomever is in charge. All year,

  I’ve said, You know what’s funny? and then,
  Nothing, nothing is funny. Which makes me laugh

  in an oblivion-is-coming sort of way. A friend
  writes the word lover in a note and I am strangely

  excited for the word lover to come back. Come back
  lover, come back to the five and dime. I could

  squeal with the idea of blissful release, oh lover,
  what a word, what a world, this gray waiting. In me,

  a need to nestle deep into the safe-keeping of sky.
  I am too used to nostalgia now, a sweet escape

  of age. Centuries of pleasure before us and after
  us, still right now, a softness like the worn fabric of a nightshirt

  and what I do not say is, I trust the world to come back.
  Return like a word, long forgotten and maligned

  for all its gross tenderness, a joke told in a sun beam,
  the world walking in, ready to be ravaged, open for business.

  From “The Hurting Kind” by Ada Limón
  (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2022).
  Copyright © 2022 by Ada Limón.
  Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions.

* The Carrying

Ada Limon. Milkweed, $22 (104p) ISBN 978-157131-512-0

"I will/ never get over making everything/ such a big deal," declares Limon (Bright Dead Things) in her gorgeous, thought-provoking fifth collection, in which small moments convey "the strange idea of continuous living." Materialist rather than metaphysical, these poems are deeply concerned with interconnectedness: "my/ body is not just my body. " Flora and fauna suffuse these poems, and the greenness is almost overwhelming, but Limon duly confronts life's difficulties. "It's taken/ a while for me to admit, I'm in a raging battle/ with my body," she writes, facing bouts of vertigo and struggling to conceive a child: "perhaps the only thing I can make// is love and art." She also tackles such social ills as misogyny, racism, and war. In "A New National Anthem," she writes, "the truth is, every song of this country/ has an unsung third stanza, something brutal/ snaking underneath." Limon's typically tight narrative lyrics feature simple, striking images, ("Women gathered in paisley scarves with rusty iced tea"), and her unsettling dream poems avoid becoming exercises in surrealism. Four "letter-poems" to poet Natalie Diaz also demonstrate versatility, shifting into looser meditations that sprawl across the page. "I live my life half afraid, and half shouting/ at the trains when they thunder by," Limon claims, but this fearless collection shows a poet that can appreciate life's surprises. (Aug.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Carrying." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 25, 18 June 2018, p. 78. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A544712392/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=78b86584. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Ada Limón; THE CARRYING; Milkweed Editions (Nonfiction: Poetry) 22.00 ISBN: 9781571315120

Byline: Matt Sutherland

The vein of greatness that pulses through the work of Ada Limón is remarkably subtle, in the same way that beauty in a human isn't a rote assemblage of chiseled noses, high cheekbones, and full lips. Her extraordinary poems act the part of an autumn leaf slowly descending from on high -- only when it reaches the ground, and you regroup your thoughts, do you realize that you witnessed something mesmerizing. Limón is the author of five collections, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, and the New York Times.

PREY

The muffled, ruptured voice of a friend turns into an electrical signal and breaks open to tell me her sister has died. A muted pause, then a heaving. Sounds sucked from lungs. Outside, as the sun descends to inch-high on the fallow horizon, a hawk grasp-lands on the telephone pole. Brawny and barrel- chested, it perches eyeing the late winter seed head of switchgrass. Later, we're talking about self care, being strong, surviving a long time. The hawk launches as the sun oozes puce and ochre and sinks. I write to another friend who says her partner is like a hawk -- steadfast, wary. I think of the sharp-shinned hunters, the Coopers, the Swainsons, how hawks are both serene and scary as hell, scary that is, if you're the mouse. That's the trick, we say, isn't it? Don't be the mouse.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Foreword Magazine, Inc.
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Sutherland, Matt. "The Carrying." ForeWord, 27 Aug. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A551890006/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=61a7af9b. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

APR Books

Ada Limón, The Carrying: Poems

Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions

Hardcover, 120 pages, August 2018

The world asks for transcription. That has been my experience, that if I recount any small terror, I will be asked for the proof of what has happened. What was said to me, exactly? Will I be told how implausible the violence I've experienced is to my auditor? To be believed requires an acetic preservation of evidence, to withhold the personal account. Ada Limón's The Carrying rejects this practice. Limón's fifth collection emphasizes a speaker who will not be coerced into carrying language that doesn't love her.

In The Carrying , Limón's speaker cannot avoid confrontation. Others speak to her. Words fall out of the mouths we don't know. But Limón doesn't prioritize the act of transcription. She gives us a speaker who is allowed to forget.

As I pump the gas a man in his black Ford F-150 yells out his
window about my body. I actually can't remember what it was.
Nice tits. Nice ass. Something I've been hearing my whole
life. Except sometimes it's not Nice ass, it's Big ass or something
a bit more cruel

.
We start with the lyric "I" and we end with its assertions. The speaker doesn't deliver the voices of strangers, though what has been said has become so familiar, it could be any number of phrases. From the impositions of others, we learn we don't need to know them for what they say to be familiar. More importantly, we don't even need to carry with us what they say.

Limón gives us a speaker who is often spoken to, and yet, she is often the only one to speak to us. From her, all others' language spills forth and she isn't beholden to save them from the worst interpretations of themselves. The "rude radio /disk jockey" is the sum of his "morning jawing ... in its exaggerated American male register." She's given control of the spigot, so to speak, expanding lexicon into a structure for making "love and art," to record the interactions that hurt us while allowing the narrative to change. The speaker turns a man's certainty against him and waits for "him to notice what he said, how a woman might feel agony." The physicist in another poem "doesn't answer so maybe I don't exist," and yet the speaker traces an entire history where "each second is in me." In turn, Limón examines the soundness of these structures: of language, of the body, of a nation, of how we love.

If so much language can be summarized or forgotten, what is quoted has special resonance. After all, the act of quotation becomes an ongoing action; from the moment the words are spoken by another, the speaker carries them, until finally she lays them out for the auditor.

What does Lorca say?

Compadre, quiero cambiar
mi caballo por su casa. Friend, I want to trade this horse
of illness for your house that praises the throat

.

I'll settle for these words you gave me: sweet smoke
and I'll plant them into my chest so I can take this
circling spell and light it on fire.
This excerpt is from a series of poem correspondences between Ada Limón and Natalie Diaz initially published as "Envelopes of Air" in The New Yorker . Separated from the correspondence, the "you" remains an intimate gesture. I have no doubt that the "you" is not me, that I don't have the right to insert myself. And yet I feel I have a set of hands giving and taking. The reader, too, can "settle for these words you gave me: sweet smoke ," which, as readers, we too now possess. We are given the intimacy of knowing language as the speaker has experienced it. And we are given the act of translation which says, I will take something you don't know and make it familiar to you. In effect, the reader has the opportunity to carry Lorca's "Romance Sonambulo" as the speaker encountered it and as she interprets it. But here, the speaker, too, is asking "Friend, I want to trade this horse/ of illness for your house that praises the throat," with the line break representing a shift into the voice of the speaker, who slants her translation.

She desires a trade for the "house that praises the throat." What is it to ask that in America, when "Perhaps/the truth is every song of this country/has an unsung third stanza, something brutal?" What is the praise we can imagine within a house that offers its people "no refuge," that is willing to make its people unfamiliar? These threats of "something brutal" are not historical. Limón makes clear that the bodies she describes are vulnerable:

Manuel is in Chicago today, and we've both admitted
that we're traveling with our passports now

.
Reports of ICE raids and both of our bloods
are requiring new medication

.
To desire the throat, its fragility, its amplification, is to find comfort where I cannot imagine it, in the visible body. But this is what Limón's collection asks. Here is a speaker who recognizes the danger of being seen: "I was struck translucent. A good look for me!" She knows invisibility is "a good look," for the othered, yet she is willing to risk the body, to be visible and in motion, to disturb other bodies: "I shook the air and screwed it all up just by being alive too." Afterwards, she asks, "Am I braver than those birds?" disturbed by her movement. The speaker denotes a bravery to living, but also a desperation in asking, as if there were another way:

All the world is moving, even sand from one shore to another
is being shuttled. I live my life half afraid, and half
shouting at the trains when they thunder by. This letter to
you is both

.
I'm not interested in the speaker living bravely. I'm interested in how she surrounds herself with living--that she is "half afraid" from living and desirous of life. "Worry" and "want" are a balanced construction throughout this collection, where the speaker may "still worry / and want an endless stream of more." The same poem begins with the speaker shouting, "I'd forgotten how much/I like to grow things ," a complicated sentiment. After all, what is encouraging her to nurture anything if she does not remember a happiness from "growing things "? But, perhaps, this is the "house that praises the throat," a nurturing rooted in the announcement of our own intentions. Perhaps praise is something of our own making, a shout from the body. Perhaps the voice can take the place of our "horse of illness" if the voice is the best vector for our desires. The "half shouting" body is balancing the "half afraid" body, which would suggest it is the voice that propels the body forward. In which case, why should the voice ever be used to carry language that doesn't love us back?

Asa Drake is a public services librarian. Her writing is published or forthcoming with The Margins, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, Frontier Poetry and elsewhere. She received her MFA in poetry from The New School and was a finalist for Gold Line Press's 2017 Chapbook Competition .

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 World Poetry, Inc
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Drake, Asa. "SPEECH AND TRANSCRIPTION: The Politics of Voice in Ada Limon's The Carrying." The American Poetry Review, vol. 47, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2018, p. 21. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A561119663/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=34653071. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Ada Limon. Milkweed, $22 (128p) ISBN 978-1-63955-049-4

The tender, arresting sixth collection from Limon (The Carrying) is an ode to the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that characterizes the natural world. The work is divided into four sections (after the four seasons), and is frequently set in the poet's garden. In this Edenic location, Limon observes the flora and fauna, which can lead to personal revelations. In "Foaling Season," the speaker describes a pasture full of mares and their foals, which allows her to reflect on her decision not to have children. Limon's descriptions of animals are richly evocative; a groundhog is "a liquidity moving, all muscle and bristle... slippery and waddle-thieving my tomatoes." The title poem movingly pays homage to the poet's family and ancestors as she recalls how her grandparents told her "never/ to kill a California King, benevolent/ as they wete, equanimous like earth or sky, not// toothy like the dog Chaco who barked/ at nearly every rrain whistle or roadrunner." In the "Summer" section, Limon contemplates cockroaches and spiderwort, then briefly recalls a trip to Argentina before declaring, "And now the world is gone. No more Buenos Aires or Santiago." Limon's crystalline language is a feast for the senses, bringing monumental significance to the minuscule and revealing life in every blade of grass. (May)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Hurting Kind." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 12, 21 Mar. 2022, p. 52. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A698558437/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=dfa4deaa. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Ada Limon was always going to be an artist. "I love the idea of making things, creating things, performing things," she says via Zoom from her home in Lexington, Ky., where she's lived for the past decade with her husband, Lucas Marquardt, a horse racing reporter. Her office's door is closed until the relentless pawing of their ancient cat ("I think we've figured out she's 21") forces her to hop up and let the animal in. "My undergraduate degree is in drama, and for a long time, I thought that my career would either be on the stage or behind the stage, in some way. I was also a dance minor. I was very much the person who was into all the performing arts. It wasn't until my junior year, when I was not allowed to take any more performing arts electives, because I had taken them all, that I took my first poetry class. And from the minute I took it, I was like, I'm in love with this. This is exactly what I wanted to do."

That class was providence, as Limon, 46, is now one of America's preeminent poets, and her prominence is only growing--as is her prolificacy. Last September, Milkweed Editions, Limon's longtime publisher, announced a three-book deal with her brokered by Rob McQuilkin at Massie &McQuilkin. The titles acquired include Beast: An Anthology of Animal Poems, which Limon will edit, and which is set to be released in 2024; a volume of new and selected poems due in 2025; and The Hurting Kind, her latest, which will hit shelves in May.

Previously, Limon had published five collections, the last three of them with Milkweed. Two of those titles attracted the attention of nearly all of the country's major literary awards bodies. In 2015, her collection Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award for poetry, while her following book, The Carrying, won the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award and was shortlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award in 2019. Both of those books received widespread acclaim, including in this magazine. In a starred review, PW called The Carrying "gorgeous, thought-provoking," and a "fearless collection." And last year, Limon was tapped to host The Slowdown podcast, a collaboration between American Public Media and the Poetry Foundation, for its third season, succeeding U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith.

It's not just the artistic establishment that has embraced Limon's work. The two aforementioned collections have sold more than 55,000 print copies combined, according to NPD BookScan--a remarkable feat in a literary form long considered a commercial black hole. Perhaps Limon herself would ascribe her books' success to a resurgence in appreciation for the form. "For all its faults, I think that social media has actually done one wonderful thing for poetry... and in many, many ways allow for poetry to become completely accessible to anyone," she told CNN last October. "It is an amazing time to be alive in the world of poetry." But Daniel Slager, Limon's editor and Milkweed's publisher and CEO, sees Limon's success as an extension of her particular gift. "In the poetry world, the whole notion of being approachable or readable can be a curse," he says, "because it's often thought to be antithetical to sophistication artistically--a stupid dichotomy, really, although at times there's something to it. But she just transcends that, in such a beautiful way, with so much integrity. Poets' poets love her, and people who don't read that much poetry love her. I think that's so remarkable." Also remarkable, Slager notes, is that her next book is, to his mind, her best yet: "It's not that common for writers that each book is better, but that's been the case with Ada."

The Hurting Kind exhibits all of the lyrical and thematic hallmarks of Limon's poetry: deft narrative, elegant poetic structure, and attunement with and appreciation for the natural world. The book is separated into four sections, each named after one of the seasons of the year, and showcases its author's deep understanding and questioning both of the nature of human interconnectedness, and of loss. Still, the book represents, in some sense, a break from Limon's prior work--or at least the narrative around it.

"One of the things that happened with The Carrying, which is totally understandable, was that it had a lot of narrative around it--it had a tagline," Limon says. While that book dealt plainly with her struggles with vertigo and with conceiving a child, she did not think that the pain those poems conveyed would dominate its critical reception so decidedly. " 'A woman struggling with infertility'--every review started with that," she recalls. "I think that part of the joy of making this book was finding out what it is to push against some of that, to write with a kind of abandon, without pinpointing a specific narrative of a life that can be summed up."

In that light, The Hurting Kind's first poem, "Give Me This," could be seen almost as a mission statement. Her recent work, she explains, is "urgently set on speaking from the me that is both the speaker and the author." "Give Me This" does just that, with the speaker describing an experience of Limon's watching a groundhog "waddle-thieving my tomatoes still/ green in the morning's shade" and "taking such pleasure in the watery bites." The poem asks, "Why am I not allowed delight?"--a question likely relatable to anyone reading poetry in a world enduring a global pandemic and facing heightened global strife and an ever-worsening climate disaster.

McQuilkin, Limon's agent, found that sentiment particularly powerful when he first read the collection, in spring 2021. "I remember getting very excited about what role the book could play out there, in these times, that are in so many ways bleak," he says. "Somehow, things feel a little less bleak when you're reading Ada, because she finds the contours of what is real, and beautiful, even when things are not perfect or complete."

In the end, the speaker of "Give Me This" allows herself that delight, becoming one, in a way, with the intruding rodent:

I watch the groundhog more closely and a sound escapes me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest, and she is doing what she can to survive.

The poem is "a little, tiny rebellion," Limon explains. "It's like, 'I'm gonna watch this freakin' groundhog and I'm not going to tell you my thoughts on suffering'--even though, of course, this book is full of joy and grief both, and life."

It is a rebellion, too, against lyric poetry's more lachrymose tendencies, which Limon admits are easy to lean into. "I always tell my students that one of the hardest poems to write is a happy poem," she says. "Try to write a contented poem and see what happens. It's really, really hard! But what is it to represent life as a whole thing, as opposed to an easy or fixed narrative?"

The book's rebellions are multifold. Another is in its poems of family. "I remember sitting with some older poets in the summer of 2001, and they were telling me that I couldn't write all these family poems--that I couldn't have grandmother poems, and I couldn't have grandfather poems, and brother poems," Limon says. " 'It's too juvenile,' they said. 'It's too tender.' So I denied myself that, because I was told that that wasn't what you were supposed to do. But so much of who I am, as a person, is in honor and in service of my relationships. And with this book, I was like, You know what? I'm 45, and I get to write whatever poems I want. And what I want to write are poems that say the word grandmother 1,000 times."

Here, they practically do. One section of the book's title poem concludes: "...my grandmother,/ (yes, I said it, grandmother, grandmother) leans to me and says,/ 'Now teach me poetry.'"

BY JOHN MAHER

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Maher, John. "The Poetry of Rebellion: With her sixth collection, The Hurting Kind, Ada Limon seeks joy amid suffering." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 13, 28 Mar. 2022, pp. 31+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A700235952/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=59996e9e. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

In ''The Hurting Kind,'' Ada Limón stands with her readers before the frightening mysteries and hopeful uncertainties of the everyday.

THE HURTING KINDPoemsBy Ada Limón

The poet Ada Limón is a welcome companion at this stage of the pandemic. She writes to counter isolation and to usher in change. Her poems presume aloneness and reach out to the reader to seal a sort of virtual communion. Her hope is tentative, hedging. Limón's consolations are small but strong, and when her poems look to the future, it's usually in the service of creating a connection in the here and now: ''Could you refuse me if I asked you / to point again at the horizon, to tell me / something was worth waiting for?'' That ''you'' is all important in Limón's work -- a wide-open beloved who is us, of course. Such a capacious embrace is a consolation, and it's no mean literary feat.

After publishing her first two books with very small presses, Limón hit the national scene with ''Sharks in the Rivers'' (2010). Her next collection, ''Bright Dead Things'' (2015), was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. ''The Carrying'' (2018) won the latter prize; it's a gut-wrenching book, Limón at her most vulnerable, facing a parade of life's major and minor disappointments, such as the inability to conceive a child, with resolve, wisdom and generous openness. In response to a friend who espouses the miracles of parenthood, Limón writes, ''we've tried a long time, been sad, been happy, / that perhaps the only thing I can make / is love and art.''

''The Carrying'' was an obvious breakthrough, in which Limón mastered her unflinching gaze and put her considerable powers of empathy at the service of her readers. Her new book, ''The Hurting Kind,'' strikes me as a transitional work, less certain of itself and its purpose than its predecessor, but also trying some new things, including longer poems. As a pandemic book, ''The Hurting Kind'' has a bit of fuzzy focus, and a small population -- a partner, a dog, a cat, and the squirrels, birds and groundhogs visible through the window. There are a few poems that don't quite fly, landing too soon on a sentimental or overly hopeful conclusion or overreaching for emotional heft, as in these lines about fishing: ''Is this where I am supposed to apologize? Not / only to the fish, but to the whole lake, land, not only for me / but for the generations of plunder and vanish.'' The apology is too broad -- yes, we are guilty of great harm, but ''the fish'' isn't the right confessor.

And yet, I soon find myself forgetting my little qualms, so grateful am I for Limón's powerfully observant eye. There are many wonderful poems here and a handful of genuine masterpieces. For instance, the book's long title poem makes something utterly startling out of a brush with sentimentality:

Before my grandfather died, I asked him what sort of horse he had growing up. He said,

Just a horse. My horse, with such a tenderness itrubbed the bones in my ribs all wrong.

I have always been too sensitive, a weeper from a long line of weepers.

I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.

This should fall flat -- I don't know this guy; why should I care? -- but I just can't walk away from that phrase: ''Just a horse. My horse.'' It's music -- Limón's excellent ear for the rhythms of speech and the sounds of sentences, the repetition of ''horse,'' the five stressed syllables grouped into three and two -- that elevates this above sentimentality, that lets us feel his longing, and hers. Sometimes, the deepest truth one can admit is that the past is irretrievable, though it never seems very far away.

''The Hurting Kind'' is packed with quiet celebrations of the quotidian. Limón looks out her window, walks around her yard, and, like Emily Dickinson, trips over infinities. On the lawn she spots

a groundhogslippery and waddle-thieving my tomatoes, stillgreen in the morning's shade. I watched hermunch and stand on her haunches, taking suchpleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not alloweddelight?

Limón observes nearby nature with such profound, hungry, questioning attention that I find I'm more than a little jealous of her skill at noticing -- I am the only one who could disallow me this kind of delight.

Limón also finds that nature often resists, even condemns, personification. In ''Privacy,'' she observes two crows landing on ''the black wet branches of the linden, / still clinging to the umber leaves of late fall.'' They seem to meet her gaze with a rebuke: ''They say, Stop, and still I want / to make them into something they are not.'' If this isn't the poet's perennial problem, I don't know what is.

Limón forces herself to confront, again and again in these poems, nature's unwillingness to yield its secrets -- it's one of her primary subjects. The seemingly abundant wisdom of the natural world is really a vision of her own searching reflection. The poem continues:

There was no message given, no message I was asked to give, only their great absence and my sad privacy returning like the bracing, empty wind on the black wet branches of the linden.

Of course, the chance to see oneself clearly, even if only for an instant, is not to be squandered, even if ''sad privacy'' is what's reflected back. And in fact that flash of clarity, gone as soon as it's apprehended, is what poetry seeks, the kind of insight that can be had only because it is fleeting.

And sometimes the mirror ripples like the clear surface of a pond and something beneath is starkly revealed -- ''a murderous light, so strong,'' Limón writes in one such moment, ''it's like staring into an original / joy.'' We all know what that is, though we can't do more than approximate a description of it, even the poets among us. Limón is great company in the presence of the inchoate, able and willing to stand with her readers before the frightening mysteries and hopeful uncertainties of the everyday.

If Limón sometimes looks too hard for the bright side, it's because she acknowledges the darkness everywhere. It's only when a poet pretends that the mysteries of the unspeakable can be solved with words, that language can and should take the uncertainty out of the questions, that poems fail. Limón, though she is sometimes guilty of optimism, has no such illusions.

Craig Morgan Teicher's fourth book of poems, ''Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey,'' was published last year.

THE HURTING KIND: Poems, by Ada Limón | 100 pp. | Milkweed Editions | $22

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Teicher, Craig Morgan. "Infinity in the Backyard." The New York Times Book Review, 5 June 2022, p. 59(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A706020257/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=89ca1927. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

Edited by Ada Limon. Milkweed, $25 (128p) ISBN 978-1-57131-568-7

Gathered by U.S. poet laureate Limon (The Hurting Kind), this beautifully curated anthology of 50 previously unpublished poems challenges preconceptions about "nature poetry" as it meditates on humanity's relationship to the planet. As Limon writes in the introduction: "these poems represent the full spectrum of how we human animals connect to the natural world." The collection opens with Carrie Fountain's wonderful "You Belong to the World": "You belong/ to the world, animal. Deal with it. Even as/ the grear abstracrions come to take you away,/ the regrets, the distractions, you can at any second/ come back to the world to which you belong,/ the world you never left, won't ever leave, cells/ forever, forever going through their changes." Gabrielle Calvocoressi's "An Inn For the Coven" provides a delightfully occult twist on the magic of life: "All our loves/ are witches too. Or warlocks. All/ our children and all our children./Welcome. Water running in the/ brook." In "To Think of Italy While Climbing the Saunders-Monticello Trail," Kiki Petrosino offers a spare and haunting poem comprising four couplets that build to a devastating finale: "These mountains have given us/ so much & we// will not even give ourselves/ to each other." Readers will find that this collection stands apart for the strength of its entries and the bteadth of its superb meditations on a pressing theme. (Apr.)

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"You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 11, 18 Mar. 2024, p. 54. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788623051/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a8804268. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World Ada Limon, Ed.

(Milkweed Editions in association with the Library of Congress, 2024)

What comes to mind when you think of nature poetry? An ode to meadowlarks? Burbling brooks? The commanding silence of the redwoods? Is it something less bucolic and gentle and more urban and visceral? Or does it reflect the uneasy relationship we are currently facing with our environment that reflects our fears and losses?

Our experience of--and existence in--nature is universal, if rarely identical. As part of her historic tenure as the 24th US Poet Laureate, Ada Limon commissioned some of the finest poets of our era to write to perhaps the most pressing issue of our time, in an anthology that is uniformly intimate, if diverse in subject matter. The collection also serves as a starting point for a National Parks project that comingles these literary offerings with poetic "exhibits" in seven national parks.

This collection will speak to those who love contemporary poetry and those who don't yet realize they do, as well as all who care about our natural world, and our place within it. The list of participants is a who's who of contemporary poetry, from Danez Smith to Hanif Abdurraqib, Joy Haijo to Donika Kelly, Aimee Nezhukumatathil to Jericho Brown.

In her foreword, Limon writes about one of her own experiences:

As I stared at the trail map, I saw the friendly little
red arrow that pointed to where I was on the
map, its caption: You Are Here. It seemed not
only to serve as a locator, but as a reminder that
I was living right now, breathing in the woods,
that there was life around me, that that natural
world was right here and I was a part of it, I was
nature too.
Marvelously, each poem marks where that poet was in their individual "here" in their current "now," perhaps even an eternal now with fifty stunning viewpoints. Limon encourages readers to make their own version of a "You Are Here" poem, and this collection is superbly designed for multiple audiences: nature lovers, poetry mavens, casual readers, or even as a generative teaching tool. This is how we praise what we still experience in the environment, and within us, "because nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are."

MANDANA CHAFFA (RAIL): How did you select the participants for this project and what kind of guidance did you provide them? I imagine that was the most difficult aspect.

ADALIMON (A.L.): Choosing the poems, choosing the poets themselves, was probably the hardest part about putting this book together. If you know me, you know that there are literally hundreds and hundreds of poets whom I love and admire in general, and are living and writing and responding to the natural world specifically. If I could have done so, this book would have been a million pages long.

I thought about the people I had read recently that were doing that work of place and that were doing interesting things: not just how they responded to landscape and nature but those who might take the prompt in new directions. I love the people that took it in a more literal way, responding directly to the natural world. And equally those who thought more about: "How does my body move in this world?" "What does safety mean?" "How does the natural world interact with urban spaces?"

RAIL I assume they all said yes, right away, because who wouldn't want to be part of this project.

A.L. Because we wanted to put it out in April, we had to move fast and were really delighted with the enthusiasm for the project. It was especially meaningful that so many of the contributors wrote directly to the prompt in a unique manner that only their idiosyncratic poetry could offer, and that kind of trust shifted the scope and soul of the anthology.

RAIL When you finally started to receive the entries, did it refine the project for you from what you initially intended? Because as a collection I felt there were multidimensional conversations happening between these poems. Did that shift your initial intentions; did it become something bigger than the sum of its parts?

A.L. That's really good insight, because, of course that happens. At the beginning of the project they wondered if I could write the introduction before I received the poems, but, other than a rough sketch, of course I couldn't until I had everything in hand. What really struck me at that point was the urgency, whether it was about the Maui fires or the urgency of living in a Black body in the United States, or the urgency of grief or death. This is when I realized that the "you are here" prompt is larger than just the landscape. It is our emotional landscape as well, and I felt so honored to read these poems because it reminded me that the gift of poetry is that there is no one lens. It's what each of us are seeing through our eyes. What we're hearing through our ears. Or feeling in our hearts. Everything that we're experiencing when we say "you are here," all of it, right now. And that was a really dramatic shift for me, because initially I was thinking through the lens of responding solely to the natural world. But of course, we're nature, too.

RAIL There are such a range of perspectives included in this collection, and I especially appreciate that you've edited it in such a way--it's comprehensive without suggesting it is complete--that it parallels our own experience of nature, underscoring that we can never really engage in all of it, that our lived experience only entails a minute fraction of what exists. After multiple readings of the collection, I still wanted more, and that's wholly appropriate: we don't know all of nature, and there's space held for the poems yet to be written.

A.L. I envision this as a call to action for everyone to respond. I don't come from a place of wisdom--I have questions, and I have curiosity, and I feel that's what these poems are also doing. They're not suggesting "this is what we know," or "this is how this works." Instead, it's "this is my life and my experience in this time and place." It leaves room for the reader and all those experiencing this crucial moment on the planet to enter into a conversation about it. Sometimes when we think about nature poetry or ecopoetics, it's really just description that honors nature, trees, animals, plants, which is wonderful. What these poems do is allow room for an emotional reaction to the beauty and awe of nature, and also to our fears, and I think that it would be dishonest to not give light to those fears, those complicated, burdensome feelings of anxiety.

RAIL As you said so impeccably, nature is not a place to visit: nature is who we are.

A.L. I wrote a poem for the National Climate Assessment ["Startlement"] and one thing all of these incredible, brilliant scientists--who are working within every single aspect of climate change throughout the United States--said to me was that when you write this poem it cannot be nostalgic, or suggest that we know what the future holds. They taught me that right now we need to think about adaptation and mitigation, not reversal. We're not going back to a prior existence. We are entering a new place, and that's our reality. That's not politics. That's science.

RAIL Congratulations on the historic second two year term of your laureateship. Might we discuss how and when you chose this project during your first term?

A.L. It's funny, you get asked right away. Very sweetly and it's because they're so excited, but you're sitting there thinking, "I'm still just processing that this is even happening."

RAIL It sounds like starting your first semester of college and already everyone wants to know what your major is.

A.L. Not only your major, but what the subject of your final thesis will be!

RAIL "Let me find my dorm room first. Can you just show me where my classes are? Where's the bathroom?"

A.L. Because so much of my work centers on the natural world, I knew that was something that I wanted to focus on. But I really also wanted the whole project to be accessible. I was excited by the prospect of putting poems in parks, and it was even more amazing when the National Parks came on board. We'll have poetry installments from the collection in seven different national parks and then our incredible partners at Poetry Society of America will continue leading that charge after I'm no longer serving in the role, so the poetry in the parks will continue beyond the scope of this effort.

I also thought about Diane Seuss's idea that nature isn't somewhere we drive to: "Nature, which cannot be driven to / To drive to it is to drive through it." When we talk about poetry and nature, I didn't want it to just be these curated, protected spaces that in some ways are designed for people who already have the mindset of going into nature. I'm equally interested in our unintentional experiences with nature, the dailyness, what happens to us on the way to the bus. I remember living in New York City when the daffodils come up in early spring. You think, how is this possible? They're coming up through the pavement. Or being in a highrise and seeing hawks outside.

I wanted people who do not consider themselves in any way, shape, or form attuned to the natural world to be able to pay attention a little more deeply. I envisioned this book as a balance to the National Park project, which celebrates our incredible protected resources, such as Mount Rainier or the Redwoods.

It is also about what it is to live with nature in our unprotected lives, in our normal quotidian lives. I was interested in the parallel where both poetry and nature become accessible to the wider public.

RAIL You're so right about New York. The first time we get that unexpected spring day at the end of winter, people go into the park and take half their clothes off. People who might always eat lunch at their desks are suddenly gone for an hour and a half, just sitting on a bench with their faces turned upward like urban sunflowers. Another thing this collection accomplishes is sharing wider cultural and individual perspectives of nature than we typically see in one place.

A.L. I have always loved nature poetry. But even as a young student studying at the University of Washington, studying at NYU, I found that most nature poetry was written by white authors.

RAIL Often white men, for that matter.

A.L. Not only white men but primarily, and thematically, it was an idea of nature being the savior, being God, being redemptive. Nature as a blank slate on which poets had their epiphanies. An important aspect of this anthology was to ensure that it was representative of different landscapes, and equally diverse array of voices and poetic styles.

Climate crisis, though it affects us all, might pale in comparison to immediate survival; so I wanted to make sure that it wasn't solely a book of praise, and also included the complicated reactions we have and lives that we lead as part of nature ourselves. An additional aspect that became clear to me as I was compiling the entries is there was a spiritual component to the collection, which is a word I don't often use. One of my most spiritual experiences with this anthology was printing out all the poems and figuring out the order.

RAIL There are so many ways one can arrange an anthology. What was your process?

A.L. It could have been alphabetical. I discussed that with Bailey Hutchinson, who's an amazing poet and is the editor of this book at Milkweed Editions, and has been such an amazing steward, because in some ways that would have made the most sense. I knew I didn't want sections, and I kept reconfiguring the poems until they started to move a certain way, and I finally saw the arc: this is a landscape! It was so emotional for me: all of these poems together are doing something I could not have even dreamed of.

RAIL It's almost like creating a multi-course meal, isn't it? The beauty of poetry is that readers can engage with it on their own timetable; read several poems on the 2 train or flutter through the pages at night and land on a page as a kind of divination. I can even experience poetry a stanza at a time, if all I have time for is that.

A.L. It's funny, because I also always love organizing my own collections. It's my favorite part. I love putting together the books themselves, and I think of it as making a long poem. This is the first anthology that I've edited, and I wondered how it would be to do that with other people's work. It was such an honor to be the curator of this collection; I thought about how the reader would experience it: What is the flow? How-do each of the poems speak to one another, which shows us both the American landscape of poetry, as well as the landscape of the natural world?

RAIL How has the laureateship impacted your ability to focus on your own poetry? Do you have time enough, breadth enough, breath enough?

A.L. I love that you ask this. I write all the time. It's the way I tether myself to the world. I might think "this will go in the new and selected" or "this will be a different book altogether." But I'm writing all the time. It's how I am in relationship with the world.

RAIL Preparing for this conversation, I've been thinking about one of your poems that I re-read frequently, "The Conditional," which ends:

Say we spend our last moments staring
at each other, hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky bum.
Say, It doesn't matter. Say, That would be
enough. Say you'd still want this: us alive,
right here, feeling lucky.
As well as "It's the Season I Often Mistake" from The Hurting Kind, which closes: "What good / is accuracy amidst the perpetual / scattering that unspooled the world" which is meaningfully not a question but a statement, and underscores an ever-present theme in your work: uncertainty. Beyond nature, I think of how uncertainty--or its cousin, possibility--is something that threads through your contemplations, and your poetry.

A.L. I absolutely am interested in uncertainty: it's one of the only things I trust. I also think uncertainty is one of the few things that actually leads to a happy life, because if you're embracing uncertainty as part and parcel of the human experience....

RAIL There's a simpler threshold of what consti tutes happiness.

A.L. I love that moment where it feels like everything's in its place; everyone's safe for one second even if it's just your small microcosm. All the animals are okay. Everything's okay. I love that moment, yet it's easy to become anxious about what will transpire in the next moment, so I focus on believing the next moment will come. But we don't know. Especially now, there are inevitabilities and catastrophic thinking that can come to the fore. So I try to notice when I'm doing it and instead think: it's a mystery, and in that way lean into curiosity as opposed to despair.

RAIL Also, apparently you're not busy enough with this enormous project with the US National Parks; there's also space poetry, as in your poem dedicated to and engraved upon the Europa Clipper, with an ending that inevitably inspires a chorus of sighs: "We, too, are made of wonders, of great / and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, / of a need to call out through the dark."

A.L. Yes! October is the launch of the Europa Clipper, when I'm going to read "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa," at the John F. Kennedy Space Center while the spacecraft takes off.

RAIL I'd like to imagine that we might get a poem back from space. That what they really wanted from us was poetry and up until now, we didn't give them the right inspiration to respond to us.

A.L. That would be unbelievably cool. I didn't know that I needed something to root for today. But that is what I'm going to root for.

Mandana Chaffa is founder and editor-in-chief of Nowruz Journal and an editor-at-large at Chicago Review of Books. She serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, where she is VP of the Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and is president of the board of The Flow Chart Foundation. Born in Tehran, Iran, she lives In New York.

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Chaffa, Mandana. "ADA LIMON with Mandana Chaffa." The Brooklyn Rail, Apr. 2024, pp. 106+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A790176341/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9bf71983. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

What books are on your night stand?

My night stand doesn't speak to me anymore. That's because, here's the truth: I don't read at night. The night stand is where books go to die. I think that I'll read something before bed and then I immediately fall asleep, so the real question is, what books are on my desk? Right now that's ''Eve,'' by Cat Bohannon; ''Martyr!,'' by Kaveh Akbar; Mosab Abu Toha's ''Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear''; ''You Can Be the Last Leaf,'' by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat; and an advance copy of ''The Backyard Bird Chronicles,'' by Amy Tan.

How do you organize your books?

I put them in piles during my busy travel months, then I cry and stomp when the piles feel unwieldy, and then my husband ponders if I should get rid of a few, but I will not do that, and then, very methodically I alphabetize them. I also separate them by genres. Prose cannot touch poetry in my little world. And I mean that as an organizing principle and also as a slight against prose.

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

I'd be reading a book in some sun-filled spot outside, while knowing every human being is safe, cared for, fed, beloved, and all wars have ended. And in our new manifested world that celebrates humanity, interconnectedness, nature and peace, I can sit outside under the oak trees and savor every line of a poem. And the music of the poem will sing back to the music of the world. That's my ideal reading experience.

Are you able to write outside, in nature, or only at a desk?

I love writing outside. When I'm home in Kentucky, I write on my screened-in porch, that is if it's warm enough. I love to fill the feeder and watch the birds in between writing lines of poems. Through the years, I've trained myself to write anywhere. Planes, hotel rooms -- anywhere, really. Though it helps if there is silence. Or sounds of nature.

How did you decide whom to commission for the new anthology?

I chose the poets that I knew had recently been working in interesting ways with the subject of nature. I feel so lucky with the final collection. It's even more powerful than I imagined.

Did anyone say no? What reason did they give?

There were exactly four poets that said no. They are all wonderful writers who were torn in too many directions by the demands of life to produce something new for the anthology. Life doesn't always allow writers to write.

Did you line-edit or advise on specific language choices?

Along with the wonderful editor (and poet) Bailey Hutchinson, I went through each poem and made a few minor suggestions. For the most part, just gentle nudges here and there. All of these poets are excellent and sent in gorgeous, complete poems.

''A place I love is about to disappear,'' one poem begins. Did you expect the collection to be so melancholy?

I don't think the book is melancholy at all. The word ''melancholy'' often infers no obvious cause, just a general sort of sadness. That's not present in this book. I do think it's full of solastalgia, which is defined as the ''distress caused by environmental change,'' and I also think the book is full of an urgent praise, the way you can love something so dearly because it's leaving or changing.

What's the last book that made you cry?

''Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts'' by Crystal Wilkinson is a cookbook and a memoir combined that celebrates generations of Black women in Appalachia. Wilkinson always has a way of saying it true and making me weep.

Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?

Oh yes, Anne Rice was a great guilty pleasure of mine. All things vampires and witches, anything with magic. What a gift those books were for me as a teenager. In some ways they were as foundational as some of the canonical books I read in school.

What's the most interesting thing you learned from a poem in this volume?

One wonderful thing I learned about was from Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poem, ''Heliophilia'': Rhubarb makes a wild popping or crackling noise when it grows in the dark. Now I've seen videos of this occurrence and I love it. We have yet to truly understand the language of plants.

Did any of the poems make you want to travel to their settings?

Many: Victoria Chang's poem set in Alaska, for example, and the desert landscape poems by Eduardo C. Corral and Rigoberto González. But for the most part the poems make me want to pay attention to wherever I am right now, to look deeply at what's around me, and not miss it.

An expanded version of this interview is available at nytimes.com/books.

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"Ada Limon." The New York Times Book Review, 7 Apr. 2024, p. 6. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A789169253/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4c990233. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

* In Praise of Mystery

Ada Limon, illus. by Peter Sis. Norton, $18.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-324-05400-9

The cadenced text of this deliberately paced poem by U.S. poet laureate Limon, making her children's book debut, will be etched on Europa Clipper, a spacecraft launching in October 2024 that will head toward Jupiter and its moons. Addressing watery Europa ("O second moon"), the work's speaker draws everyday existence on planet Earth into relationship with that remote celestial body. "From earth," early lines scan, "we read the sky/ as if it is an unerring book/of the universe...// Still, there are mysteries below our sky"--mysteries that render our planet's inhabitants "creatures of constant awe,/ curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom." In spreads of textured, primal blue that evoke depth and distance, Calde-cott Honoree Sis depicts earthly figures adrift in air and water: birds and whales, a book of knowledge, a bloom-filled tree enclosed in a drop of water. Both delicately and expansively wrought, it's a work of unity that describes how, though separated by unimaginable distance, the realms are connected by water and more: "We, too, are made of wonders, of great/ and ordinary loves,// of small invisible worlds,// of a need to call out through the dark." The poem's text and an author's note conclude. Ages 4-8. Author's agent; Rob McQuilkin, Massie and McQuilkin. Illustrator's agent; Brenda Bowen, Book Group. (Oct.)

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"In Praise of Mystery." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 28, 22 July 2024, p. 65. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A803518177/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8f6452f7. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Limón, Ada IN PRAISE OF MYSTERY Norton Young Readers (Children's None) $18.99 10, 1 ISBN: 9781324054009

In U.S. Poet Laureate Limón's debut picture book, soaring images and lyrics invite contemplation of life's wonders--on Earth and perhaps, tantalizingly, elsewhere.

"O second moon," writes Limón, "we, too, are made / of water, // of vast and beckoning seas." In visual responses to a poem that will be carried by NASA'sEuropa Clipper, a probe scheduled for launch in October 2024 and designed to check Jupiter's ice-covered ocean moon for possible signs of life, Sís offers flowing glimpses of earthly birds and whales, of heavenly bodies lit with benevolent smiles, and a small light-skinned space traveler flying between worlds in a vessel held aloft by a giant book. Following the undulations of the poet's cadence, falling raindrops give way to shimmering splashes, then to a climactic fiery vision reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh'sStarry Night before finishing with mirrored human figures made of stars. Visual images evocative of the tree of life presage what Límon writes in her afterword: that her poem is as much about "our own precious planet" as it is about what may lie in wait for us to discover on others. "We, too, are made of wonders, of great / and ordinary loves, // of small invisible worlds, // of a need to call out through the dark."

A luminous call to think about what is and to envision what might be.(Picture book. 7-10)

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"Limon, Ada: IN PRAISE OF MYSTERY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A802865204/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=82e40f9a. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

And, Too, the Fox

Ada Limon, illus. by Gaby D'Alessandro. Carolrhoda, $18.99 (24p) ISBN 979-8-7657-3925-2

In soaring lines of poetry that feel as graceful as the creature they describe, Limon (In Praise of Mystery) considers a fox seen in a fenced backyard, "flashing across the lawn,// squirrel bound and bouncing" with characteristic vulpine leaps. D'Alessandro (The Cot in the Living Room) uses a strong digital line and sleek, stylized elements to show the fox against backdrops of sunrise pink and dusky blue. Here, the figure is seen suspended in midair before landing to pounce, engaging in almost casual-feeling pursuit of smaller animals that "doesn't seem/ like work at all but play." On the street at night, the fox explores garbage bags out for collection, assembling "a living out of leftovers// and lazy/ rodents too slow for the telephone pole." Though the fox is visible to two humans silhouetted in a home's window, its life and the lives of its witnesses do not meet: the fox "never cares how long you watch...// never cares// what you do once he is gone." The sense of having entered the world of a wild animal for a few unexpected moments lingers in this refreshing picture book encounter. Ages 5-9. (Jan.)

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"And, Too, the Fox." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 37, 30 Sept. 2024, p. 52. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A811729313/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8967d70f. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

Edited by Ada Limon

(Milkweed Editions)

In her charming introduction to this anthology, US poet laureate Ada Limon suggests that poems and trees "let us breathe together." This comment calls to mind priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "God's Grandeur," which notes a rejuvenating spirit infusing the world--"nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things"--as well as Jesuit theologian and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's phrase "the breathing together of all things." The anthology subtitle's preposition "in" signals Limon's intention to help readers get outdoors, where they might breathe with other creatures of earth.

Limon and the poets she gathers in these pages show that when people claim their places outdoors, they breathe with trees, birds, and other outdoor inhabitants. As trees in a forest stand in proximity, their branches reaching out into communities of peers, the poems of Limon's anthology relate to one another in their attentiveness within nature.

The whisper of wind through leaves of a backyard tree might draw a listener's attention, eliciting memories of that tree's planting and of its neighborhood history, or inviting the listener to research the tree's botanical ancestry. In You Are Here, poet Cecily Parks feels anticipatory grief for a beloved hackberry tree about to be cut down. She muses on the homely reputation of the hackberry as a species, and she remembers how, for years, that particular doomed hackberry spread its branches to make a shelter for her.

Hiking to see redwoods, Dorianne Laux expects to feel small under the giant trees. Instead she feels lifted by them:

I felt large
inside my life, the sum of Jung's
archetypes: the self, the shadow,
the anima, the persona of my
personhood fully recognized
and finally accepted, ...
Ellen Bass describes pushing a stroller through a park called Lighthouse Field as the maple trees above her become houses of light, the evening sun resting on their branches, crowning them in gold. Alberto Rios steps into his backyard for a choral revelry with sparrows, spiders, geckos, and caterpillars.

In the Yahwist's creation story in Genesis 2, after breathing life into the man, God plants a garden of other breathing things. Then God gives the man creative license to breathe out names for all the plants and animals he sees. Jose Olivarez imagines feeling shamed by trees for his inability to remember their names. He cannot tell a maple from an oak. Similarly, Molly McCully Brown watches herds of mule deer and feels alone and "herdless" in a new place, without words to identify even the common, spreading vegetation around her. Even so, she declares that "what // comes first is wonder / ... at having woken // someplace new."

Feeling out of place in a corner of the Sonoran Desert, under a eucalyptus tree native to Australia, Rigoberto Gonzalez's Mexican grandmother, speaking in her native dialect, encourages that tree and the tulips at her feet to grow. In a universal language of life, rain falls on all three migrants together--the woman, the tree, and the flowers. Analicia Sotelo recalls her grandfather's shadows in a natural landscape of dry grass and mesquites that frame loss for her. She imagines the old man scoffing at her imaginative description of herself as an outsider and nowhere a native. In another desert immigrant poem, this one hilarious, Eduardo C. Corral speaks in familiar tones to a saguaro, reminding the treelike cactus of its Mexican relatives. Then he pays tribute to two other migrants dear to him: his mother and the sonnet.

Carl Phillips lets weeds stand for a poets' first jottings. They "mean nothing." Then bees swarm through those ordinary blades of grass with ministrations that pollinate and promise new growth, perhaps implying the inspiration of the imagination that turns random thoughts into a finished poem.

You Are Here demonstrates that poems are packages of language waiting on a page to be read or recited, the breath of readers matching the breath of the poet. The poem might be constructed formally, according to convention and tradition, or shaped more obliquely, cracked and bent syntactically and linearly to release locked-in literary energy. In private reading or in social recitation, the poem might breathe out its sound and sense. Limon's anthology plants a strong stand of poems that help us breathe together with one another and all of creation.

Jeffrey L. Johnson is the editor of Stars Shall Bend Their Voices: Poets' Favorite Hymns and Spiritual Songs.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Christian Century Foundation
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Johnson, Jeffrey L. "Poems that help us breathe together: A new anthology edited by US poet laureate Ada Limon invites us into the natural world." The Christian Century, vol. 142, no. 4, Apr. 2025, pp. 92+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837164958/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b130b39e. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

* Startlement: New and Selected Poems. By Ada Limon. Oct. 2025. 232p. Milkweed, $28 (9781639550517). 811.

U.S. Poet Laureate Limon has established herself as a lyricist of enrapturing narrative, astonishing intimacy, and unmatched insight into quotidian connections between human and animal worlds across her six widely acclaimed collections. Poems from Lucky Wreck (2005) and This Big Fake World (2006) introduce a new, already assured voice describing moments of dreamy liberation and confrontations with volatile masculinity. In Sharks in the Rivers (2010), Limon's preoccupation with animal life brims with humorous turns and glances askance at strangers; "Sharks bite fewer people each year than / New Yorkers do, according to Health Department records." Limon's voice matures with an eye toward death and new beginnings in Bright Dead Things (2015); "I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying," and in The Carrying (2018), "On my way to the fertility clinic, / I pass five dead animals." The Hurting Kind (2022) continues this self-aware trajectory; "She is a funny creature and earnest, and she is doing what she can to survive," and Limon's new work teems with abundance, "it was always him, from forelock to fetlock, / standing in a field, waiting for me to call him home." A fine testament to the life's work of a poet for our times.--Diego Baez

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
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Baez, Diego. "Startlement: New and Selected Poems." Booklist, vol. 122, no. 1, Sept. 2025, p. 19. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A861534307/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=327e9c81. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Startlement: New and Selected Poems

Ada Limon. Milkweed, $28 (232p)

ISBN 978-1-63955-051-7

* | In a retrospective spanning two decades, former U.S. poet laureate Limon (The Hurting Kind) captures the mind and soul with exquisite linguistic mastery and vision that will compel readers to earmark every other sentence. Limon raises the standards for elegy, needling the heart with surgical, diaphanous, and cathartic reverie. She exemplifies the fortitude and compassion of her grandfather, who "carried that snake to the cactus,/where all sharp things could stay safe" and delights in the casual morbidity of her grandmother, who tells her "of all the traffic accidents/ as if she was reading a menu to me out loud." The poet harnesses perseverance through perspective ("A friend says the best way to love the world is to think of leaving"), as well as transcendentalism ("She thinks she can almost hear it,/the snow falling, deliberate proof/ that even the sky wants to return and return/ to this shattering world"). Limon 's voice is humble despite its nearly omniscient acuity, weaving her experience into the greater human condition. With its devastating wit, magnetic power, and arresting ingenuity, this volume is one of a kind. (Sept.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
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"Startlement: New and Selected Poems." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 35, 15 Sept. 2025, p. 50. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A856143214/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c630c057. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

During your laureateship, how did you balance bringing poetry into public spaces with the privacy required for one's own writing? I learned an enormous amount while I was serving as the laureate for three years, but one of the most valuable lessons I had to learn was how to untangle myself from the public role. I had to protect my privacy, my mental and physical health, my loved ones, and I needed to carve out time to be who I truly am outside of any public expectations. The larger the demands, the more I needed to deeply retreat into my private life and my private poems. I had to write a great many poems with no intention of sharing them; those private poems kept my secret self alive.

What are the central preoccupations of the collection's new poems? The new poems in Startlement were all written in the last few years, and many of them wrestle with the themes of what it is to be an artist in a world that often doesn't privilege art or art making. Many of them deal with my own connection to nature and the connectedness to the living world that's essential for my own well-being.

What most surprised you while putting this collection together? Putting together this collection was surreal in many ways, most profoundly in the way it revealed my own preoccupations with the big questions central to my life. It seems for the last 25 years, the questions that keep returning are as follows: How do we live in a world that contains so much suffering? How do we live in a world whose beauty is otherworldly and boundless? How do we ever know each other, and is it even possible to know each other? How do we live in these bodies that are unruly and mortal? How can I offer something, even the smallest made thing, some strange idiosyncratic song, an imperfect echo, to nature and humanity so they will know how much they are loved? Then, of course, there are the themes of birds, creeks, trees, and horses. The questions are endless, and the music keeps changing. Putting together this book made me recommit to making poems. I can see how making poems has changed my life; it changed my life by making me pay attention to it.

How have your travels across the country shaped your relationship to writing about the natural world? After traveling to almost every state in the country, I have such deep love for the diverse landscapes that make up this complicated place. From deserts spotted with saguaro cactuses and towering redwood forests that meet the Pacific Ocean to small towns in the mountains surrounded by riverine pathways and large crowded cities pulsing with life. Everywhere I went, it reminded me that we are all on this one planet together, whether we like it or not. This place is all we have. When we lose it, we lose ourselves. There is an urgency to this beauty. We must write about it.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
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Popa, Maya. "ADA LIMON: The former poet laureate gathers new work and selections from her 20-year career in Startlement." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 35, 15 Sept. 2025, p. 22. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A856143172/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=620de74c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

"The Carrying." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 25, 18 June 2018, p. 78. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A544712392/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=78b86584. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. Sutherland, Matt. "The Carrying." ForeWord, 27 Aug. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A551890006/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=61a7af9b. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. Drake, Asa. "SPEECH AND TRANSCRIPTION: The Politics of Voice in Ada Limon's The Carrying." The American Poetry Review, vol. 47, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2018, p. 21. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A561119663/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=34653071. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. "The Hurting Kind." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 12, 21 Mar. 2022, p. 52. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A698558437/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=dfa4deaa. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. Maher, John. "The Poetry of Rebellion: With her sixth collection, The Hurting Kind, Ada Limon seeks joy amid suffering." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 13, 28 Mar. 2022, pp. 31+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A700235952/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=59996e9e. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. Teicher, Craig Morgan. "Infinity in the Backyard." The New York Times Book Review, 5 June 2022, p. 59(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A706020257/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=89ca1927. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. "You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 11, 18 Mar. 2024, p. 54. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788623051/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a8804268. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. Chaffa, Mandana. "ADA LIMON with Mandana Chaffa." The Brooklyn Rail, Apr. 2024, pp. 106+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A790176341/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9bf71983. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. "Ada Limon." The New York Times Book Review, 7 Apr. 2024, p. 6. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A789169253/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4c990233. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. "In Praise of Mystery." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 28, 22 July 2024, p. 65. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A803518177/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8f6452f7. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. "Limon, Ada: IN PRAISE OF MYSTERY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A802865204/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=82e40f9a. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. "And, Too, the Fox." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 37, 30 Sept. 2024, p. 52. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A811729313/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8967d70f. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. Johnson, Jeffrey L. "Poems that help us breathe together: A new anthology edited by US poet laureate Ada Limon invites us into the natural world." The Christian Century, vol. 142, no. 4, Apr. 2025, pp. 92+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837164958/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b130b39e. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. Baez, Diego. "Startlement: New and Selected Poems." Booklist, vol. 122, no. 1, Sept. 2025, p. 19. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A861534307/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=327e9c81. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. "Startlement: New and Selected Poems." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 35, 15 Sept. 2025, p. 50. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A856143214/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c630c057. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. Popa, Maya. "ADA LIMON: The former poet laureate gathers new work and selections from her 20-year career in Startlement." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 35, 15 Sept. 2025, p. 22. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A856143172/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=620de74c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

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