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“I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn‘t know then that it wasn‘t even love that I was interested in, but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.“

—from “Calling Things What They Are“

I love Ada Limon. A beautiful collection of poems, as usual.

Ada Limon, our newest Poet Laureate, continues to put forward personal, powerful, moving poetry that delves deeply into the human condition - love, loss, pain, regret. She just keeps getting better. Highly recommended.

#IndelibleMoments Day 13: #Truth(s) told in verse move me deeply. The poems here tug at my heartstrings.

A soothing collection of poetry most often occupied with the natural world, but with a lot to say about humanity. It felt apt I left this book outside in my backyard and came back to find a bird had pooped on it. Limón reminds us to decentre ourselves, to revel in our own unimportance. She shows us there's a lot to learn from nature: how play is work, death is ordinary, there is wildness in everyone, desire is not something to rid yourself of.

Ada Limon is our new Poet Laureate https://www.npr.org/2022/07/12/1110804783/ada-limon-named-new-u-s-poet-laureate

5☆ An utterly gorgeous and moving collection on interconnectedness between humans, nature, our ancestors and dead things. Ada Limón is an absolutely stunning poet! Her words always hit so deep. I could have highlighted this whole book honestly, every line is beautiful. The way she writes and pulls me in, connecting me to her words and experiences is nothing short of brilliance! I was in tears more than once. #bookreview #poetry #poet

I love how Ada Limon uses nature as a lens or a mirror as a means to write about the human condition. Her poetry speaks to me in a lot of ways that other modern poets do not. Her work feels like poetry. It feels pertinent. It‘s at once beautiful like a lake on a summer day, yet like all lakes it has its deep, dark areas where the sun never touches, and where the imagination runs away with the possibilities hidden in those depths.

Some post-surgery reading.

What a gorgeous book. In the way Ada Limón grounds so many of her poems with naming, I‘m reminded of Mary Oliver and the love both ecstatic and serene that characterized the depth of her attention. In the way Limón engages with memory it is, indeed, a conjuring, as the process of remembering builds the memory anew in the moment each time. I feel like the work of these poems is in how they reduce the distance between beings, and I love them for it.

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