
The Carrying
Poems
Ada Limon(Author)
Milkweed Editions (Publisher)
Published on 14. August 2018
Book
Hardback
120 pages
978-1-57131-512-0 (ISBN)
Description
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD
From National Book Award finalist Ada Limon 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 Limon 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."
In Bright Dead Things, Limon showed us a heart "giant with power, heavy with blood"-"the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it's going to come in first." In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full display-even as The Carrying continues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.
FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD
From National Book Award finalist Ada Limon 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 Limon 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."
In Bright Dead Things, Limon showed us a heart "giant with power, heavy with blood"-"the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it's going to come in first." In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full display-even as The Carrying continues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Minneapolis
United States
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
Six black and white photographs by Sebastiao Salgado
Dimensions
Height: 215 mm
Width: 139 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-57131-512-0 (9781571315120)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
