Ada Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. Without sacrificing a terrific eye for detail and image, they draw out the emotions that charge us and the landscape we cover between homes.A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact-tracing in intimate detail the ways the speaker’s sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. The poems in Bright Dead Things give off their own light, moving with terrific force and speed. This is not to say that her verse lacks texture or vivid imagery rather, moments in Limón’s poetry are heightened by the combination of lexical playfulness and emotional depth. Limón’s poetry regularly rebukes the ironic mode commonly employed by a number of her contemporaries, and opts for unabashed and strong emotional language. The poems are interested in the balance between internal and external loci of control, how someone may want to be known and identified on their terms, not lumped into categories and stereotypes. Limón’s wears her heart on her sleeve, and in this collection that heart takes the form of a huge, pounding horse’s heart. Read Full Review >īright Dead Things by Ada Limón is musical, emotional, and honest, its verse muscular and unflinching. Limón’s writing has a Whitman-esque quality to it in the way the speaker weaves back and forth between abstract language and concrete images, all while sharing her present experience with her readers. She makes these connections between everyday moments and her deepest anxieties, each written in a stream of consciousness that is so organic, it feels like the speaker surprises herself. I first felt that we were following the journey of a female speaker towards womanhood and beyond, but quickly realized that this book could span a moment, a day, a month, or a lifetime. Limón’s meticulous placement of every piece appears chronological, but in an almost surreal way. Aptly fit into verse, all of these silenced flashes of human experience get their play time. It’s the voice people ignore in the in-between moments of life that races through sensations, emotions, memories and predictions.
It’s not one of a particular person, but of a consciousness.
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