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'.
Finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award
In Bright Dead Things, Ada Limón considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact. Her poems trace in intimate detail the various 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.
In these extraordinary poems the poet's 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,' she writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous and accessible - though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt and lived.
Bright Dead Things breeds a particular mixture of wildness. The mixture is by turns melodious and tight. Limón's poems are like fires: charring the page, but leaving a smoke that remains past the close of the book.
