Reviewed by Sarah D’Stair

Ada Limón's The Carrying does what its title suggests: it carries. Carries grief. Carries loss. Carries love, memory, joy, and silence. It carries our broken bodies, our wild panic, our peaceful slumber.

In short, it carries us. Or at least it tries. 

Limón possesses what all good poets hope to possess: a preternaturally heightened sense of what constitutes living. She shows us suffering and desire; creating and wanting to create; the fraught ways we love and touch; repulsion, fear, rapture; the difficult act of simply standing still. She unearths our vitalities from their habitual hiding places—a conversation with one's mother, a highway overpass, a common garden weed, the shine of a beetle's shell—so we all might access them, too.

First published in 2018 to excellent reviews, and newly released in paperback, The Carrying has been celebrated for its intimate style and for Limón's ability to channel societal distress into verse about her own private suffering. This technique has come into even sharper focus since its first printing, for in the last year and a half we have all experienced a collective mourning for lost livelihoods and loved ones to either virus or violence. Reading The Carrying now, after all that has happened, I am struck by its penetrating poetic vision of communal surviving.

Limón's brilliance is in her way of searching, in how she burrows into the unknown to find its roots in known, tangible things. "The Leash" opens with what might be a description of where we are now:

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate-metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what's
left?

Later in the poem, we are surrounded by "a crepitating crater of hatred," a landscape agitated with those grating "cr" sounds. Limón asks a question laden with music—"isn't there still / something singing?"—then answers transparently, with a dull, abrupt thud: "The truth is: I don't know." Limón frames this questioning in the grounded image of walking her dog, yanking his leash to save him as he runs "toward the pickup trucks breaknecking down / the road." She has a point to all of this, though. The end of the poem, rejecting didacticism, peers over the edge with us toward realization:

Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

Limón's poetry often re-imagines our origins and our relationship with the natural world. The first poem in the collection, "A Name," reverses the biblical naming myth to wonder if Eve might have desired the plants and animals to name her instead. Likewise, "Ancestors" dismantles what we know of our beginnings, un-naming and un-remembering places associated with birth until finally the speaker's being-ness comes not from the solid substance of flesh, but from "the lacing patterns of leaves."

"Dead Stars" also reminds us that our bodies are comprised of stuff borrowed from the cosmos; we are on loan from the universe for a while, and we will all eventually, inevitably, give ourselves back. This understanding does not come easily: the poem opens with a speaker who is "a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying." Limón celebrates this "trying," seeming to compel us with compassion on the journey:

Look, we are not unspectacular things.
       We've come this far, survived this much. What 

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

Limón's generosity is part of why we connect with her so deeply, perhaps especially in times of deep pain. She writes poems about suffering from vertigo and a painful curvature of the spine, and she shares with us her immense grief over being unable to bear a child. Her hardships may not mirror ours exactly, but the graciousness of her verse brings us into kinship. The poet's body becomes the social body itself, alive but struggling, growing but stumbling, softened by sadness—but also, like us, irritated and impatient for change. 

Often, Limón's poetic structures reveal paths toward insight. She weaves together sensory and intellectual experience, modeling a way of seeing that leads to transformation. In "The Burying Beetle," for example, the poet tends to her garden, and in the process tends to her own loneliness: 

Each nicked spindle of morning glory
or kudzu or purslane or yellow rocket
(Barbarea vulgaris for Christ's sake),
and I find myself missing everyone I know.
I don't know why. First come the piles
of nutsedge and creeper and then an
ache that fills the skin like the Cercospora
blight that's killing the blue skyrocket juniper
slowly from the inside out.

Eventually the speaker falls into sorrow, laying her body down into the flowerbed "among red burying beetles and dirt / that's been turned and turned like a problem / in the mind." These twin realities—that both flower and human will decay—are offered not as metaphor, which distances, but as a shared languishing. All the life forms in this poem, plant, insect, and animal, are in direct communion both physically and psychically as they lay together on the ground. And here is where Limón shows us how we must begin to live, not as separate entities one from another, but as a single interrelated system of birth and growth and death.

Amid the intense emotional resonance of Limón's work, one might easily overlook the sheer artistry of her writing. Some lines are so beautiful that they themselves carry the power of resistance, a balm against inevitable processes of change and loss. Consider lines such as "The sky's white with November's teeth" from "Carrying," or "we gathered like a blustery coven on the blanket / from Mexico" from "Dream of the Men," or "Desire is a tricky thing, the boiling of the body's wants" from "Notes on the Below." The exuberant music of the language allows us to revel in joy even within poems that also welcome grief, injustice, and pain.

This reissue of The Carrying could not have come at a better time. Poetry won't save any of us from the things that hurt us, but at least it might offer us the goodwill of a good poet, one like Limón who, through her own sadness, reminds us that each spring we find "branches giving way // to other green branches, everything coming back to life."