The Carrying: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry - Softcover

Limón, Ada

Softcover

ISBN 10: 147215455X ISBN 13: 9781472154552

Publisher: Corsair, 2019

Synopsis

The #1 bestselling new collection from National Book Award finalist Ada Limón are 'Exquisite poems about love, fertility, desire, this natural world we move through, the political climate, so much more' Roxane Gay

About this title

About the Author

Ada Limón is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times and American Poetry Review, among others. She lives in both Kentucky and California.

From the Back Cover

'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. The Carrying is a gift'
Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former US Poet Laureate


'Ada Limón is a poet of ecstatic revelation. Her poetry feels fast, full of detail, often playful, and driven by a conversational voice. This book represents a powerful deepening of the poet's perspective into themes of loss, chronic pain, fear of the 21st century's ongoing devastations, concern for the natural world. It's a book of deep wisdom and urgent vulnerability, driven by language that feels not only beautiful but permanent and powerfully wrought, like a mountain. It leads you to the beautiful bright mountaintop of language, then guides you gently down into the rocky valleys of a conscious human heart'
Tracy K. Smith, Guardian


'In her dazzling, precise, transformative collection, The Carrying, Ada Limon offers us meditations on mortality, womanhood, the body, and that which grows in the earth, all the while slyly positing: How should we treat each other in this precarious life? Like humans, is her answer, like humans'
Jami Attenberg

From the Inside Flap

'Exquisite poems' Roxane Gay


From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Ada Limón comes The Carrying - her most powerful collection yet.

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 The Carrying, the poet's heart is on full display - even as she continues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.

Edition details

• Publisher: Corsair
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 147215455X
• ISBN 13: 9781472154552
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112