95 pages
English language
Published May 20, 2018 by Milkweed Editions.
"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 …
"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."--Publisher's website.
Not my cup of tea.
I neither particularly liked the themes nor the style. Basically just prose with paragraphs.
There were some nice analogies and metaphors but they were repeated too often which made them less impressive (e.g. "my forked tongue").
I love the perspective present here. Quotidian and suburban but contemplative of larger forces we all must adapt to no matter how comfortable, or not, our lives are. The final poem wraps up the overall themes - motherhood, domesticity, natural forces - nicely and with an emotional punch. I’m not sure I would call many of these pieces poetry, though, and I almost wish there was more attention to structure. I think the themes would have been better served in a fragmentary novel similar to what Jenny Offill has been doing. So I’m somewhat ambivalent but I enjoyed the reading experience.
