The Carrying Poems Author:Ada Limón From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist 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 ... more »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.?
In Bright Dead Things, Limón 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.« less