The Carrying: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

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From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Ada Limon 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 Limon 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.'

THE CARRYING leads us deeper towards the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.

Reviews

Exquisite poems about love, fertility, desire, this natural world we move through, the political climate, so much more

[Ada Limon's] new collection is her best yet, a much needed shot if not of hope, then perseverance amid much uncertainty - NPR

In her dazzling, precise, transformative collection, The Carrying, Ada Limon offers us meditations on mortality, womanhood, the body, and that which grows in the earth, all the while slyly positing: How should we treat each other in this precarious life Like humans, is her answer. Like humans

In these poems, joy and longing and grief sing with a music that- regardless of what I am burdened or blessed to carry - makes me want to live passionately and fully in the difficult world. The Carrying is a gift

Author Bio

Ada Limon is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times and American Poetry Review, among others. She lives in both Kentucky and California.