The Carrying: Poems

WINNER OF THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
ALA NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018
FINALIST FOR THE 2019 PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD

From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Ada Lim³n 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€•€œWhat 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: €œEvery song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.€ And still Lim³n shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. €œFine then, / I€ll take it,€ she writes. €œI€ll take it all.€

In Bright Dead Things, Lim³n showed us a heart €œgiant with power, heavy with blood€€•€œthe huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it€s going to come in first.€ In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full display€•even as The Carrying continues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.