Poetry

Bright Dead Things

Poems
By
Ada Limón
A Finalist for the National Book Award
Select Format

A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things examines the dangerous thrill of living in a world you must leave one day and the search to find something that is “disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.”

A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact—tracing in intimate detail the 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. Ada 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, accessible, and “effortlessly lyrical” (New York Times)—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.

ISBN
9781571314710
Publish Date
Pages
126
Dimensions
5.5 × 8.5 × 0.31 in
Weight
6.3 oz
Cover Art

Related Media

Watch: Ada Limón at the 2015 National Book Awards Finalists Reading | National Book Foundation
Watch: Ada Limón at the 2016 AWP Fair | PBS Books
Author

Ada Limón

Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate as well as the author of The Hurting Kind and five other collections of poems.

Praise and Prizes

  • “Ada Limón’s calling card is her relaxed, winningly unpretentious voice… . A study in casual intensity.”

    “Best Poetry Books of 2015”
    New York Times Book Review

  • “Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things … buoyed me in this dismal year. I’m thankful for this collection, for its wisdom and generosity, for its insistence on holding tight to beauty even as we face disintegration and destruction.”

    Celeste Ng
    Buzzfeed

  • “The lyrical genius of these poems sings to us of the perennial theme of home and our primordial ache of belonging. Ada Limón captures all the nuances that these colossal words call to mind with the gorgeous voice of her diction, and the timbre of her images. Both soft and tender, enormous and resounding, her poetic gestures entrance and transfix.”

    Richard Blanco

  • “A poet whose verse exudes warmth and compassion, Ada Limón is at the height of her creative powers, and Bright Dead Things is her most gorgeous book of poems.”

    Rigoberto González
    Los Angeles Review of Books

  • “Ada Limón doesn’t write as if she needs us. She writes as if she wants us. Her words reveal, coax, pull, see us. In Bright Dead Things we read desire, ache, what human beings rarely have the heart or audacity to speak of alone—without the help of a poet with the most generous of eyes.”

    Nikky Finney

  • “Ada Limón’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. Generous of heart, intricate and accessible, the poems in this book are wondrous and deeply moving.”

    Library Journal
    (starred review)

  • “In Bright Dead Things, there’s a fierce jazz and sass (‘this life is a fist / of fast wishes caught by nothing, / but the fishhook of tomorrow’s tug’) and there’s sadness—a grappling with death and loss that forces the imagination to a deep response. The radio in Ada Limón’s new rural home warns ‘stay safe and seek shelter,’ and yet the heart seeks love, risk, and strangeness—and finds it everywhere.”

    Gregory Orr

  • “In these wonderful and wondering poems, Ada Limón picks things up, puts them down, daydreams, sings, and casually, unpretentiously finds everything strange, all the while uttering truths that have a light, mysterious accuracy. This poetry is confident enough to let the world and its words take center stage. And yet, Limón does far more than merely reflect the world: she continually transforms it, thereby revealing herself as an everyday symbolist and high level duende enabler.”

    Matthew Zapruder

    You Might Enjoy

    Based on this book, we recommend you try…
    Poetry

    You Are Here

    Ada Limón

    Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of fifty poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by our most celebrated contemporary…

    Poetry

    The Hurting Kind

    Ada Limón
    Longlisted for for the Griffin Poetry Prize Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
    An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
    Poetry

    Aster of Ceremonies

    JJJJJerome Ellis

    A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their…