Reviews with content warning for Racial slurs - Bright Dead Things: Poems

Lyrical but not convoluted, accessible but challenging enough, with both relatable and profound lines. I enjoyed this collection a lot as a poetry dilettante.

from Mowing:

I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It’s not sadness, though it may sound like it. I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.

from The Long Ride:

(...) How good it is to love
live things, even when what they've done
is terrible, how much we each want to be
the pure exonerated creature, to be turned loose
into our own wide open without a single
harness of sin to stop us.

from The Wild Divine:

and I thought, this was what it was to be blessed-
to know a love that was beyond an owning, beyond
the body and its needs, but went straight from wild
thing to wild thing, approving of its wildness.

favorite poem: Field Bling

other poems I *really* enjoyed: The Quiet Machine, I Remember The Carrots, The Tree of Fire, Someplace Like Montana, In The Country of Resurrection, The Problem With Travel, The Great Blue Heron of Dunbar Road, Lies About Sea Creatures, Service

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bashsbooks's review

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challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

4.0

Limón's poetry is sometimes brain-sparking and illuminating and sometimes a boring slog. I can't quite put my finger on why - I think at times she doesn't accurately balance how much description the reader needs to see where she's going. A lack of images gets fuzzy and vagueness is hard for the mind focus on. That said, I felt that the poems became clearer and her work altogether more understandable the further I read, so perhaps it was intentional.

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