Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Carrying: Poems
    Unavailable
    The Carrying: Poems
    Unavailable
    The Carrying: Poems
    Ebook106 pages1 hour

    The Carrying: Poems

    By Ada Limón

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMilkweed Editions
    Release dateAug 14, 2018
    ISBN9781571319944
    Author

    Ada Limón

    Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate as well as the author of The Hurting Kind and five other collections of poems. These include, most recently, The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limón is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review, among others. Born and raised in California, she now lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

    Read more from Ada Limón

    Related to The Carrying

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      An Anti-Racist Poetry Reading List

      Jun 8, 2020

      These recent poetry collections offer poignant narratives and snapshots of racial injustice in America. The post An Anti-Racist Poetry Reading List appeared first on The Millions.

      1 min read

    • Article

      Diving Through Windows

      Dec 13, 2017

      BY JUSTIN HOCKING I dwell in Possibilit y — / A fairer House than Prose — / More numerous of Windows — / Superior — for Doors — —Emily Dickinson My wife and I live in a 1907 Craftsman bungalow with original crown glass windows. They were hand-blown i

      6 min read

    • Article

      What Living In A House Is Like

      May 1, 2022

      Standing in each stanza—no, I’m sorry—room. Standing in each room waslike standing in a tester stroke of wall paint. All these blobs of colors in rows and columns, the size of thumbs.Together—a portrait of potential. But blues leaped to yellow leaped

      1 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Winslow, Kois, Tóibín, and More

      Jan 17, 2023

      Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new release titles from De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Dan Kois, Colm Tóibín, and more—that are publishing this week. Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to he

      7 min read

    • Article

      Restless Herd

      Apr 14, 2021

      Restless Herd
      21 min read

    • Article

      Diaspora Sonnets

      Sep 1, 2022

      The old men drink their spritzers and gossipunder awnings. Red hued and blustery, like two roosters on the side of a road.Skyward they crane their necks and laugh, sometimes they wonder about kings and future kingsand how the muscles peer from their

      2 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      The painting is of a door, its wood so warpedwith moisture it cannot close. It stays ajar leaving a sliver of light—enough to suggestsomething sweet and almost unreachable behind the door—and you sit in yourroom working on the bills or those comforti

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Bryan Washington

      Dec 3, 2018

      1. This year, I read a lot on my phone. That’s a habit I’ve picked up from working gigs where you stand a bunch (watching kids on a swingset, watching adult children park their cars). Some folks don’t vibe with that, but those folks don’t pay my bill

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Kevin Barry

      Dec 18, 2020

      Rattling around the house in the County Sligo hills, swinging from bouts of paranoia to moments of strange, demented hilarity, a 900-page doorstopper was just what I needed to stay grounded. The post A Year in Reading: Kevin Barry appeared first on T

      2 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      5 min read

    • Article

      Still Dancing

      Feb 13, 2019

      Still Dancing
      12 min read

    • Article

      The Time Is Now

      Aug 18, 2021

      Suggested Reading: What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August) by Alice McDermott The author of eight novels, three of which were named Pulitzer Prize finalists, including Charming Billy, which won the

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Chantal V. Johnson

      Dec 2, 2022

      Chantal V. Johnson reflects on 2022 through the books she read. The post A Year in Reading: Chantal V. Johnson appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: November 2020

      Nov 5, 2020

      Stop obsessively refreshing the New York Times's elections page, and check out these new books of poetry by Alice Quinn, Margaret Atwood, Yi Lei, Karina Borowicz, Valzhyna Mort, and Paul Celan. The post Must-Read Poetry: November 2020 appeared first

      6 min read

    Reviews for The Carrying

    4.5/5

    52 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Rarely do I buy hardcover poetry, especially by unfamiliar poets, but I took a chance here because of the reviews and the few poems I read online. I was richly rewarded with this wonderful collection. The poems reflect so broad a range of sexual longing, grieving, loving, the importance of gardening and the natural world, and the power of family. Poetry is all about the words, and reading these poems aloud shows the beauty of her talent.
    • 5/5
      I listened to this on audio while working and while trying to fall asleep - possibly 5 times now. Each time I have a new favorite poem.