A review by lidia7
Bright Dead Things: Poems by Ada Limón

emotional reflective medium-paced

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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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Grief, Death of parent

Moderate: Animal death, Racial slurs