Bright Dead Things: Poems - Softcover

Limón, Ada

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571314717 ISBN 13: 9781571314710

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 2015

Synopsis

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

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

A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact—tracing in intimate detail the ways the speaker’s sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Ada Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous, accessible, and “effortlessly lyrical” (New York Times)—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.

About this title

About the Author

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1571314717
• ISBN 13: 9781571314710
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128