FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book
Critics Circle Award, Bright Dead Things examines the dangerous thrill
of living in a world you must leave one day and the search to find
something that is "disorderly, and marvelous, and ours."
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. 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. "I am beautiful. I am
full of love. I am dying," the poet writes. Building on the legacies of
forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón's work
is consistently generous, accessible, and "effortlessly lyrical" (New
York Times)--though every observed moment feels complexly thought,
felt, and lived.
