The Carrying

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limn comes The Carryingher 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 infertilityWhat 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 Limn shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. Fine then, / Ill take it, she writes. Ill take it all. In Bright Dead Things, Limn showed us a heart giant with power, heavy with bloodthe huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / its going to come in first. In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full displayeven 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.