So I went to Dallas this past weekend and got practically no reading done. It was still a good reading weekend though because while in Dallas we visited a bookstore that I really liked, The Wild Detectives. Sitting in what looks like a converted cottage in an artsy district, it was started up a few years ago by two guys from Spain and features a limited "curated" selection of high quality literature along with a bar serving up booze and coffee. Sounds awesome, right? It is. So while I hardly ever buy new books at cover price, I was definitely buying something here, I just didn't know what.

I wandered over to the poetry section, two shelves worth by the bar, and this Ada Limón volume got my attention. I'd heard good things of Limón but never had read her, until opening this book and reading the amazing poem smartly printed on the front flap, as well as being the first poem in the book proper, a poem about fillies at the race track, titled "How to Triumph Like A Girl", which goes in part,

But mainly, let's be honest, I like
that they're ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don't you want to believe it?

It's an incredible, ebullient poem, and turns out it won the Pushcart Prize, though I didn't yet know that, so its power is no secret. I flipped forward a few pages and found something almost as good, a prose poem titled "Mowing", but the tone has changed from bravura to something more like vulnerability:

I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It's not sadness, though it may sound like it. I'm thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it's hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.

Right, that's my decision made. I bought it.

I spent today reading the whole thing and it's so good. The first two sections are narrative, in that the first focuses on her move from New York to Kentucky to be with her husband, and the second focuses on the death of her stepmother. The first has 17 poems, every one of them something I'd read again and again. There's the two already mentioned, a baseball poem showcasing domestic contentment, a poem of rebellion against that contentment ("Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented / the contentment of the field. Why must we practice / this surrender? What I mean is: there are days / I still want to kill the carrots because I can."), almost every poem bringing in nature as something that can save us ("A view / of some tree breathing and the mind's wheels / ease up on the pavement's tug. That tree, / that one willowy thing over there, / can save a life, you know?")

The second section of 15 poems speaks to living with a forced awareness of mortality, caring for a dying loved one and how to respond. In the prose poem "After You Toss Around the Ashes", Limón writes, "After it was done, I couldn't go back to my life. You understand, right? It wasn't the same. I couldn't tell if I loved myself more or less. It wasn't until later, when I moved in with him and stood outside on our patchy imperfect lawn, that I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying." We're all busy dying, but lines like "How good it is to love live things" (in "The Long Ride") and "there is so much life all over the place" (in "In the Country of Resurrection") show Limón embracing the measure of life we're all allowed.

The last two sections, another 30 poems, seem to lack the organizing narrative focus of the first two, but are more generally about how to live, and be, in this wild and blessed world. There's a lot of nature here, and a general optimism; she reads quite a bit like Mary Oliver or Wendell Berry. In "The Wild Divine" she writes of a neighbor's horse:

and I thought, this was what it was to be blessed -
to know a love that was beyond an owning, beyond
the body and its needs, but went straight from wild
thing to wild thing, approving of its wildness.

She writes other poems about birds and herons, whales and mud swallows, but other poems as well that are more internal, or about people she's loved in her past. These poems are generally presenting a speaker who is optimistic and determined in her ability to find contentment and sufficiency amid life's uncertainties. And in the final poem, "The Conditional", after asking the rhetorical question, "Say tomorrow doesn't come..." and imagining the end of the world, she concludes

Say, It doesn't matter. Say, That would be
enough. Say you'd still want this: us alive,
right here, feeling lucky.

Now, go, and be blessed. ( )

An absolutely magical collection of poems full of yearning, liveliness, rage, and beauty. Ada Limón almost paints more than writes here: she offers up such clear pictures and moments and has them overflowing with emotion and story. I LOVED these pieces and will continue to read whatever Limón shares. ( )

The speaker in Ada Limon’s poems seems at first glance to focus on the confessional, letting the reader see her sadness and her moments of epiphany. By the end, this reader realizes these seemingly personal poems touch on the universal, showing
us Blake-style, the universe in a grain of sand. The reader sees New York City, Kentucky and places out west through her eyes and in many of the poems the act of pulling up roots and setting them down in a new place shows reasons a speaker might be tempted to let fear win, to retreat from uncertainty or tragedies such as a catastrophic accident, infidelity or horses dying in a trailer fire. Experience often makes one question whether the effort is worth it. And then Limon shows, selflessly, a speaker trying imperfectly to move forward, an act of courage or defiance. The poems seem to be a loose stream of consciousness until one reads them again, and realizes the disparate images at the beginning tie together into a satisfying epiphany by the end. This is the well-structured work of a strong craftsman. That’s the testament of how strong this collection is, the fact the poems consistently reward multiple reads.
( )

I initially picked this book of poems up because I saw that Ada Limón was the new Poet Laureate for the country. I hadn’t heard of her before and wanted to see what her poetry was like. Wow am I glad I did! Between this collection and the next one I read of hers, The Hurting Kind, she has become my new favorite contemporary poet. I adore the lyrical way she writes on both simplistic and more complicated subject matters. When someone can take an everyday sight and infuse it with such global meaning and emotion, I am done for.

I also appreciate the fact that these aren’t all just poems about being in love or breaking up or both. I see that a lot in contemporary poetry. These poems cover a wide range of experience in every day life and the full range of emotions that come with it. You bet I went and put all her other poetry on hold at the library. ( )

From the new poet laureate. I can't decide if she would be a fascinating lover, or if she would cut me, or both. ( )