Bright Dead Things: Poems

After the loss of her stepmother to cancer, Ada Limón chose to quit her job with a major travel magazine in New York, move to the mountains of Kentucky, and disappear. Yet, in the wake of death and massive transition, she found unexpected love, both for a man and for a place, all the while uncovering the core unity between death and beauty that drives our world. I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the author writes. It's this narrative of transformation and acceptance that suffuses these poems. Unflinching and unafraid, Limón takes her reader on a journey into the most complex and dynamic realms of existence and identity, all while tracing a clear narrative of renewal.

Throughout, the poet lulls us into the security of her lines, only to cut into us where we least expect it. This is not New York and I am not important,” she writes midway through a poem about her new home. A poem opens with the revelation that Six horses died in a tractor-trailer fire. / There, that's the hard part. I wanted / to tell you straight away so we could / grieve together.”Bright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.”