Kira Gresoski
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The Carrying by Ada Limón Review
Ada Limón’s poetry collection The Carrying is a roadmap book for me and the poetry I want to write. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2018, The Carrying shows that the personal, hyper-specific details of our lives can be portals into a shared, communal experience. Limón is a master of atmosphere and mood, and her colloquial poems center on mundane and common events in her life, while expanding into larger questions and concerns about being human. Many of the poems in this collection wrestle with Limón’s struggles with infertility, a subject that hasn’t much been explored in this medium. While crafting poems about this intimate, personal subject, Limón also captures the pervasive feeling in our culture at this moment, the dread of what’s happening to our planet, the concern about our collective future, and the fear that our culture has grown more destructive than creative. In the poem “Trying,” Limón opens with the image of her trellising tomatoes while her husband paints the basement, and she shouts to him, “I’d forgotten how much/I like to grow things” (9). She goes on to write
By Kira Gresoski4 years ago in Poets