THE CARRYING

The Carrying

Winner of The National Book Critics Circle Award

One of the most anticipated books of 2018, NPR, Publisher's Weekly
One of the best books of Fall 2018, Buzzfeed
One of the Best Books of 2018, Publisher's Weekly
One of the Big Indie Books of Fall 2018, Publisher's Weekly
17 Books to kick-start fall, Oprah Magazine
One of the ten best poetry books of 2018, Chicago Review of Books
One of the best books of 2018, PBS Books
Notable Book of 2018, American Library Association

Paperback / ISBN: 978-1-57131-512-0 / Pages: 96 / Milkweed Editions, August 14, 2018

From The Publisher: 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 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.

"Ada Limón is a straight genius when it comes to noticing. Her poems turn the way horses seem to birth full-grown horses into a metaphor for love, and turn goldfinches into a reminder that there is always a chance at being nurtured by the thing that brings you pain—or at least a possibility that it won't bury you." —Reginald Dwayne Betts, New York Times

OTHER POETRY COLLECTIONS

15th Anniversary Edition: Lucky Wreck

Winner of the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize, selected by Jean Valentine
ISBN: 9781938769801 / 15th Anniversary Publication Date: April 2021 / 88 Pages / Paperback / $17.95

Purchase online

"From the first lines of Lucky Wreck, I was drawn in by this smart, jaunty, musing, quirky voice, and as I read the whole book I felt more and more respect for Ada Limón's risky, haunting, wonderfully unexpected work. Like many of the best writers, she is funny and serious at the same time, the depths and heights are one: lucky wreck!" —Jean Valentine

ANTHOLOGIES

Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook

Edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Paperback / ISBN 978-1587299049 / Pages: 350 / 2010, University of Iowa Press / $29.95

Puchase at a local bookstore / Purchase online

"Here is an astonishingly generous gathering of poetic energies and imaginations aimed toward turning more and more classrooms into scenes of transformative engagement with the prime instrument of our humanity, language. The essential work of exploratory play with words is presented in heartening variety in its necessary wildness, surprising pleasures, gravitas, illumination."
—Joan Retallack

Named Fire Cover When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women

by Andrea Hollander Buddy
Paperback / ISBN 978-1932870268 / Pages: 440 / 2008, Autumn House Press / $34.95

Purchase online

"Utterly of-the-moment and thoroughly inclusive, When She Named Fire, in step with this historical importance, will hold the attention of even the most well read of interested poetry connoisseurs: even those already well-acquainted with women writers in particular."
—Cold Front Magazine

CHAPBOOKS

What Sucks us in

What Sucks Us In Will Surely Swallow Us Whole

Cinematheque Press, 2009 Chapbook
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99 heart 99¢ Heart

Big Game Books, 2007 Chapbook
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