The Carrying by Ada Limón is a slim poetry collection that is incredibly powerful. It opens with “A Name,” in which Eve is naming the animals in the garden, but Limón asks if Eve wanted them to speak or if they spoke to her about naming them. It calls to my mind the burden of names and all they carry - the expectations and the aspirations. Would these animals have meant or been any less if they remained unnamed?
There are so many poems in this collection that I’ve read before either online or in journals, and I can see why this collection caught my eye. There are many subjects I focus on in my own writing from ancestors to the burden of modern life with its violence. It’s a heavy burden to carry, but the questions Limón leaves us with is how do we respond to these burdens? How do we deal with them?
From “The Vulture & the Body” (pg. 12-13)
“I sat alone in the car by the post office and just was
for a whole hour, no one knowing how to find me, until
I got out, the sound of the car door shutting like a gun,”
In “On a Pink Moon,” the narrator is broken and hiding anger under a rock and planting seeds, but we learn that we are the weeds. Anger is the weed. With each poem, the poet is looking to us to become introspective about our own emotions and reactions.
Limón, like all of us, struggles with sadness, anger, and disappointment. But she seeks to understand those emotions not by burying them away, but holding them up to light. In one poem, a friend cuts deep into a wound as the narrator’s infertility is a sore subject, and calls attention to her own action of quick retaliation by ordering alcohol that he cannot have because he is an alcoholic. “I want him to notice what he said, how a woman might feel agony,/emptiness, how he’s lucky it’s me he said it to…” (pg. 73) We wound when wounded, and this makes me wonder if we spent less time in our heads and more time speaking of our pain, would empathy grow larger? Would we be kinder?
In her poem, “A New National Anthem,” she reminds us that what we sing is not the whole of the song, and in fact there are burdens buried in the absent stanzas of the Francis Scott Key anthem. What service do these missing lyrics serve, except to bury a past we wish to forget? Perhaps a new anthem in which “my bones/are your bones” is what is needed to lift these burdens we carry. The Carrying by Ada Limón is a collection I will have to buy, as my copy went back to the library. It is a collection I will return to again and again.
RATING: Cinquain
About the Poet:
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. These include, most recently, The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award.
Limón is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review, among others. She is the former host of American Public Media’s weekday poetry podcast The Slowdown. Born and raised in California, she now lives in Lexington, Kentucky.