Bright Dead Things: Poems

Bright Dead Things is art on paper, it is painting with words. Limón’s sermonic deliverance of snapshots of her life in poetic form tug at the raw emotions we experience when dealing with love, loss, and life. In “The Quiet Machine” Limón says “then there’s the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can’t be quiet anymore.” Hinting to the buried angst and complacency we may all experience at one point or another that will eventually unearth itself. Limón devotes a large section of Bright Dead Things to the loss of her step-mom in an anguished and heart wrenching assembly of poems. In “The Riveter” she says, See, our job was simple: keep on living. Her job was harder, the hardest. Her job, her work, was to let the machine of survival breakdown, Lending a stark reminder of the realities of sickness and death that swiftly invokes feelings of empathy and compassion for her and her family during that time. Death makes an appearance in many forms throughout this book, like in “The Long Ride” when she says “I bet that horse might have wanted to / die before he died.” Unsurprising though, with a name like Bright Dead Things. The theme of landscape, wilderness, and wildlife dominate the pages of this National Book Critics Circle and National Book Award finalist. Limón gives a humanness to nature while simultaneously giving an organic wildness to herself. In “The Rewilding” Limón says, “I don’t want to be only the landscape: the bones buried” and in “Mowing” she says “I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine,” tying her self-depiction directly to things of the land. Limón takes special care to masterfully pay homage to history and the origins of places she has been and things she has seen. In “During The Impossible Age of Everyone’’ she says “There are so many people who’ve come before us, / arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo.” Or in “Trick of the Light” when she says “Now, there are no oranges at all in the whole / of San Fernando Valley, no oranges, just names // of streets: Orange Boulevard, Orange County. / The way we do. Naming what’s no longer there.” Gently forcing the reader to examine the impact we have made on our surroundings, human or otherwise, over the years, Ambivalence rings loud throughout Limón’s poems as she moves from state to state expressing feelings of loneliness and enthusiasm concurrently. In “Nashville After Hours” Limón says “the bully girl who / kicked you out of the city is no one, no rotten / crumb left, just a dizzy river of nonsense.” Then in “The Problem with Travel” she says “but I want to be / who I am, going where / I’m going, all over again.” Limón acquaints the reader with the ebbs and flows that come with moving to a foreign city that looks drastically different than the one you came from before and the eager nervousness that may follow along for the ride. Jumping from calamity to calm, from mayhem to tranquility, Limón keeps us in a vulnerable yet curious state as we journey with her through the happenings of her life and the profound emotions that accompany being human. Limón seamlessly intertwines whimsical, abstract ideas with very real, tangible cognitions like in “The Other Wish” as she compares life to a lightbulb saying “what’s your brilliant glaring wattage? // What do you dare to gleam out and reflect?” Limón’s brilliant writing makes way for unforgettable imagery making Bright Dead Things not only an easy read but a must read.

I first read Limon’s poem How To Triumph Like a Girl in a magazine called The Sun—a weird little creative writing periodical that was sent to my home probably by accident, and in which I connected with very little until I stumbled upon Limon’s masterpiece. If you haven’t read it, you need to. The poem, not The Sun. God, not The Sun. The poem had an emphasis on woman-power, but as a man I felt equally inspired and in awe of human strength and self-belief. I read a lot of poetry, but this little beauty stopped my world's rotation for a few minutes. So simple and profound. I nibbled on it for days like a sustaining trail mix in a hostile jungle. Poetry as condensed, creative, and courageous words are important to those of us who feel like we don’t have enough genius or time to catch all the ideas and feelings that run like water through unconscious fingers. Wait a minute. That was genius. I want to thank my family, my editor, the Academy, and any one of the gods of the top ten religions. So, I bought the book. Many of the poems in this book delivered the same seismic wallop as “How To Triumph...” Limon is great at appreciating life while complaining about the sucky stuff in a way that doesn’t completely coagulate into mere bitchiness. It’s crude enough to be authentic, but even when it gets a little weird (e.g., squatting to pee in the poem “Service”), it feels like it was about time for someone to piss on the rules. (Pardon the phun…I did mention I’m a certified genius, write?) I loved Limon’s criticism of the evasiveness and self-loathing of many constricting forms of religious belief. Life is inscrutable but beautiful, and life lived with open-eyed hopefulness—“the sweet continuance of birth and flight in a place so utterly reckless…How masterful and mad is hope”—is infinitely preferable to adopting a traditional faith by which one can pretend to “fix their problems with prayer and property.” The benefits of her humanistic/naturalistic/agnostic life include: “…[a] new way of living with the world inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost.” “…nesting my head in the blood of my body…I relied on a Miracle Fish, once…that was before I knew it was by my body’s water that moved it, that the massive ocean inside me was what made fish swim.” The coup de grace to fundamentalist religion arrives in a description about a time in her life when she tried believing in prayer as tradition suggests, but she couldn’t make it work. “There was a sign and it said, This earth is blessed. Do not play in it. But I swear I will play on this blessed earth until I die.” Sounds like a good idea. The play part. Not the die part.

Ho acquistato questo libro per fare un regalo di compleanno e la persona che l'ha ricevuto ne è rimasta molto contenta!

Beautifully written, each poem is so captivating, I read the whole book in one go. I keep coming back to read them again, finding new layers, words and images I hadn't noticed. Nothing feels forced, the imagery of animals and the nature, the way Ada Limón deals with her sense of herself, with love, with her coping of domesticity and loss. These poems are uplifting, there is a sincere and universal human-ness in them, if there is such a word.

Limon's poems flow with an ease and a fit into their own sense so perfectly that it makes every one a pleasure to read. The Kentucky poems are marvelous. I could hardly stop reading them and put my light out at night.

I was blown away by this poet. It's been a long time since I've read such consistently good work. Bravo.

the power of her language and imagination is extraordinary.