Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry
Updated: Aug 8
Ada Limón served as the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States from 2022 to 2025. As she states in the foreword, although she did a great many things in her role, including her signature project “You Are Here,” there are only two obligations: an opening reading at the Library of Congress and a closing lecture or conversation there. Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry is the closing lecture Limón gave on April 17, 2025. And what a speech! Having seen her in person (in conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer in Minneapolis in October 2025), I could hear her voice as I read the words, but what I would have given to have heard her deliver this in person.
Against Breaking touches on, and argues for, so many things I have found to be true about poetry since writing poetry came back into my life after a twenty-five-year absence, and, as Limón says in the foreword, “I was given a fifty-minute time limit, and I knew, despite wanting to say so much about the current state of the world, I wanted to do at least one thing: make a case for poetry.” Make a case she does, with passion, with lyricism and storytelling, with inspiration. I’ve already read it twice, and, like an indispensable book of poetry, Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, for a recent example, or the aphorisms of the Tao Te Ching or The Art of Peace, I will return to Against Breaking time and time again when I need to be reminded of, to be regrounded in, the beauty and humanity we so often lose sight of in the world.
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