Startlement: New and Selected Poems

(Hardback)

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An essential collection spanning nearly twenty years of emphatic, fearlessly original poetry from one of America's most celebrated living writers.

Drawing from six previously published books-including widely acclaimed collections The Hurting Kind, The Carrying, and Bright Dead Things-as well as vibrant new work, Startlement exalts the mysterious. With a tender curiosity, Limn wades into potent unknowns-the strangeness of our brief human lives, the ever-changing nature of the universe-and emerges each time with new revelations about our place in the world.

Both a lush overview of her work and a powerful narrative of a poet's life, this curation embodies Limn's capacity for "deep attention," her "power to open us up to the wonder and awe that the world still inspires" (The New York Times). From the chaos of youthful desire, to the waxing of love and loss, to the precarity of our environment, to the stars and beyond, Limn's poetry bears witness to the arc of all we know with patient lyricism and humble wonder.

"A poet of ecstatic revelation" (Tracy K. Smith), Limn encourages us to meet our shared futures with open and hungry hearts, assuring "What we are becoming, we are / becoming together."

Reviews

Praise for Ada Limn's Previous Works:

Ada Limn is a bright light in a dark time.Vanity Fair

I can always rely on an Ada Limn poem to give me hope, but Limns poems dont give us the kind of facile Hallmark hope; rather, her hope is hard-earned, even laced with grief or happiness. . . . Limn is a master at making a simple idea (that of hindsight, seeing the bright side of things) askew. And so I have / two brains now, she writes. Two entirely different brains. Limn gives us two brains in her poems too, revealing new ways to view the world.Victoria Chang, New York Times Magazine

A poet whose verse exudes warmth and compassion, Ada Limn is at the height of her creative powers.Los Angeles Review of Books

Limn is a poet of ecstatic revelation. Her poetry feels fast, full of details, often playful, and driven by conversational voice. This book represents a powerful deepening of the poets perspective. . . . Its a book of deep wisdom and urgent vulnerability, driven by language that feels not only beautiful but permanent and powerfully wrought, like a mountain. It leads you to the beautiful bright mountaintop of language, then guides you gently down into the rocky valleys of a conscious human heart.Tracy K. Smith, Guardian

Ada is one of those people who can recognize all the ways we inflict pain on one another, not to mention our planet, without getting consumed by it. She writes in that space between grief and joy."NPR

In her sixth collection of poetry,The Hurting Kind, Ada Limn seeks to find the intimate connections between the seemingly disparate in the everyday: humans and the natural world, the living and the dead, the intellectual and the spiritual. The collections title is aptit is a testament to the innate power of feeling, whether grief, rage, or tenderness. For Limn, the current Poet Laureate of the United States, who declares herself too sensitive, a weeper . . . the hurting kind, even the seemingly banal facets of our existence deserve not only observation, but also empathy and amazement.TIMEMagazine

Exquisite A powerful example of how to carry the things that define us without being broken by them.Washington Post

All of Limns books have found a home on my bookshelf, each volume a heartfelt reckoning of what it is to be alive. In her collections, I find a grace that demonstrates her versatility and wisdom as well as a surrendering. She explains that the central question of her work is, How do we live in the world Yet shes a poet as comfortable with questions as with answers.Guernica

[Ada Limn] is one of my all-time favorite writers, someone whose work I return to again and again for solace, inspiration, and truth.The Atlantic

Author Bio

Ada Limnis the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States. She is the editor of theYou Are Hereanthology and the author of five collections of poems, includingThe Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award andBright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. She's also the author of the picture bookIn Praise of Mysterybased on the poem engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper. Limn is a MacArthur Fellow, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named aTIMEWoman of the Year. Her work has appeared in theNew Yorker, theNew York Times, andAmerican Poetry Review. She lives in Glen Ellen, California.