The Carrying
Ada Limón
Milkweed Editions
From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Ada Limón comes <i>The Carrying</i>&#8212;her most powerful collection yet.<br> 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&#8212;"What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?"&#8212;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."<br> In <i>Bright Dead Things</i>, Limón showed us a heart "giant with power, heavy with blood"&#8212;"the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it's going to...