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Bright Dead Things

Poems

ebook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available
The National Book Award finalist. “Limón’s poems are like fires: charring the page, but leaving a smoke that remains past the close of the book.”The Millions
 
Bright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately “disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.”
A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact—tracing in intimate detail the various ways the speaker’s sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.
 
“These poems are, as my students might say, hella intimate. They are meticulously honed and gorgeously crafted.”―Huffington Post
“Limón’s work is destined to find a place with readers on the strength of her voice alone. Her intensity here is paradoxically set against the often slow burn of life in Kentucky, and the results will please readers.”—Flavorwire
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 24, 2015
      Limón (Sharks in the Rivers) goes into deep introspection mode in a fourth collection in which her speakers struggle with loss and alienation. As her poems move across varied geographies (New York, Kentucky, California), Limón narrates experiences in bewildering landscapes that should otherwise feel familiar. Perhaps feelings of alienation result from intersections of identity; perhaps they are the cost of memory, a theme woven through each of the collection’s four sections. Memory inhibits Limón’s speakers’ acclimation to change: “You’re the muscle/ I cut from the bone and still the bone remembers.” Alienated, she returns to places and memories that are not familiar. “Bellow” exemplifies a palpable grief over feelings of loss and lost-ness. In it, Limón’s ungendered speaker, estranged from any surroundings, is rendered unable to communicate feelings of loss. Using a litany of dark imagery, Limón’s speaker maps where language fails, ending the poem with the insinuation of an undefinable, haunting sound, as if the speaker is a wandering phantom. In “Home Fires,” the poet wonders, “How could I have imagined this? Mortal me,/ brutal disaster born out of so much greed.” Recurring instances of anxiety about mortality in Limón’s poems complicate experiences so richly written and felt.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from June 1, 2015

      In her newest volume of poems, Limon (Sharks in the Rivers) delves into the divided self--self separated by geography, by loss, by change, by circumstance. In "Torn," she says "something/ that loves itself so much it moves across/ the boundaries of death to touch itself/ once more, to praise both divided sides/ equally...." Limon's landscape is Brooklyn, California, and the horsey and blue-grassy hills of Kentucky, and her writing is intensely intimate and wild, softly sensual and bold. In the mostly lyric narratives, with an occasional prose poem included, loss and redemption are apparent, and love--whether tough love or easy love--is resilient. "How good it is to love/ live things, even when what they've done/ is terrible, how much we each want to be...turned loose/ into our own wide open without a single/ harness of sin to stop us." VERDICT Generous of heart, intricate and accessible, the poems in this book are wondrous and deeply moving.--Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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