Bright Dead Things
- Mar 16, 2024
- 2 min read
★★★★☆
I first learned of Ada Limón from the podcast Poetry Unbound. Produced by On Being Studios, home to Krista Tippett’s long-running interview program On Being (on which many of my favorite poets have been interviewed), Poetry Unbound is my regular source for new poetry. At one point, I told friends that I felt the podcast had saved my life. Or, if that’s too dramatic, it at least buoyed me when life felt particularly heavy.
In any event, I heard Limón’s poem, “Wonder Woman,” and was an instant fan. (As a total aside, if you didn’t know, Limón became the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States in 2022.) Fast forward a year, and I’ve read many of her poems—those I’ve managed to find online in one form or another—which felt like uncovering what I imagined to be a “greatest hits” of sorts: her most beloved poems that fans had photographed, scanned, or in other ways electronically reproduced.
Bright Dead Things, published by Milkweed Editions in 2015, is full of poetry that, as a poet, I can imagine myself writing; that, perhaps, one day I might be lucky enough to write. That is, Limón writes from a place of self, about life, about navigating through life, about living a life full of all the things life brings—joy, sorrow, pain, simple pleasures, grand gestures, absurdities and fleeting moments and lovelinesses and connection—that resonates with me on a deeply personal level.
Listing favorites from this volume would be like an Oscar acceptance speech: I’d be sure to forget someone important. So though I’m very tempted to do so, I’ll refrain. Also: It would take too long. And that would be my sole complaint about this collection (which seems an absurd thing to complain about), but its 62 poems are just too much. Too much ground covered, too much to absorb, too much to hold onto. Or, perhaps, too much to have gotten from the library, where the pressure to read and return in the check-out window is, for me anyway, real.
There was no magic to choosing Bright Dead Things; it’s the Limón book the library had. As it happens, with three books published before and two after, it sits in the middle of her oeuvre, so I have plenty of room to navigate in either direction. And I will. Along with Carl Sandburg, Mary Oliver, and David Whyte, Limón has quickly become one of my poetry touchstones.
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