Bright Dead Things
Poems
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
The National Book Award finalist. “Limón’s poems are like fires: charring the page, but leaving a smoke that remains past the close of the book.”—The Millions
Bright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately “disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.”
A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact—tracing in intimate detail the various ways the speaker’s sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.
“These poems are, as my students might say, hella intimate. They are meticulously honed and gorgeously crafted.”―Huffington Post
“Limón’s work is destined to find a place with readers on the strength of her voice alone. Her intensity here is paradoxically set against the often slow burn of life in Kentucky, and the results will please readers.”—Flavorwire
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lim n (Sharks in the Rivers) goes into deep introspection mode in a fourth collection in which her speakers struggle with loss and alienation. As her poems move across varied geographies (New York, Kentucky, California), Lim n narrates experiences in bewildering landscapes that should otherwise feel familiar. Perhaps feelings of alienation result from intersections of identity; perhaps they are the cost of memory, a theme woven through each of the collection's four sections. Memory inhibits Lim n's speakers' acclimation to change: "You're the muscle/ I cut from the bone and still the bone remembers." Alienated, she returns to places and memories that are not familiar. "Bellow" exemplifies a palpable grief over feelings of loss and lost-ness. In it, Lim n's ungendered speaker, estranged from any surroundings, is rendered unable to communicate feelings of loss. Using a litany of dark imagery, Lim n's speaker maps where language fails, ending the poem with the insinuation of an undefinable, haunting sound, as if the speaker is a wandering phantom. In "Home Fires," the poet wonders, "How could I have imagined this? Mortal me,/ brutal disaster born out of so much greed." Recurring instances of anxiety about mortality in Lim n's poems complicate experiences so richly written and felt.
