The Carrying: Poems

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD

From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon 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 Limon 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, Limon 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.