The Carrying
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry
-
-
3.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- 3,99 €
-
- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY 2019
Ada Limón is a poet of ecstatic revelation . . . a book of deep wisdom and urgent vulnerability' Tracy K. Smith, Guardian
'Vulnerable, tender, acute . . . The Carrying is a gift' Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former US Poet Laureate
'Exquisite poems' Roxane Gay
From National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Ada Limón comes The Carrying - her most powerful collection yet.
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility - 'What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?' - and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: 'Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.' And still Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. 'Fine then, / I'll take it,' she writes. 'I'll take it all.'
The Carrying leads us deeper towards the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I will/ never get over making everything/ such a big deal," declares Lim n (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 green-ness is almost overwhelming, but Lim n 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." Lim n'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," Lim n claims, but this fearless collection shows a poet that can appreciate life's surprises.
