The Carrying
Poems
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The Carrying
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Narrated by:
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Ada Limón
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Written by:
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Ada Limón
About this listen
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD
From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón 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 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.”
In Bright Dead Things, Limón 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.
©2018 Ada Limón (P)2023 Milkweed EditionsWhat the critics say
Winner of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award
ALA Notable Book of 2018
Finalist for the 2019 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
“Limón has a novelistic knack for scene, and the narrative lyrics in this remarkable collection, her fifth, could stand as compressed stories about anxiety and the body.”—New York Times
“Exquisite . . . Limón is always a careful witness, accurately recording the moment, rather than trying to transcend it. Evocative dreams and pivotal memories help make this collection a powerful example of how to carry the things that define us without being broken by them.”—Washington Post
“[In The Carrying] the National Book Award-nominated poet pens paeans to the world’s limitless capacity to astonish.”—O, The Oprah Magazine