“Here it is,” writes Ada Limón, “the new way of living with the world / inside of us so we cannot lose it, / and we cannot be lost.” Bright Dead Things, the book that houses these lines, serves as the poet’s primer to this rapturous way of living. Its pages are washed in a symphony of dogs, birds, flowers, bugs, grasses—growing and dying creatures of every imaginable kind. We are made to notice the world through the poet’s vivid transformation of it, asking questions as we go about mortality and tenderness by watching a retired police horse or an invisible heron. Perhaps the most lively animal of all is the collection’s speaker, a tough and curious woman who rips up her father’s crop of carrots as readily as she finds shapes in the clouds. Her fierce, heartfelt and contemplative way of reacting to the world has not gone unnoticed. Published in 2015, Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award––a staggering trio for one collection.

Originally from Sonoma, California, Ada Limón went on to earn her MFA from NYU. Her first two collections were published almost simultaneously: Lucky Wreck was selected for the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize by Jean Valentine and This Big Fake World for the 2005 Pearl Editions Poetry Prize by Frank X. Gaspar. Her third collection, Sharks in the Rivers, was released by Milkweed Editions in 2010. Now the author of five books of poetry, Limón’s work has also appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Tin House and American Poetry Review. Her work is often noted for its spirit of exploration: poet Matthew Zapruder describes her as a writer who “picks things up, puts them down, daydreams, sings, and casually, unpretentiously finds everything strange,” praising the “light, mysterious accuracy” of her truths. “When poetry comes to me, it’s usually a way of making sense of the unimaginable,” she says. “I don’t have answers, I’m simply searching for them.”

The Carrying, Limón’s latest collection, was named one of the most anticipated books of 2018 by NPR. Interrogations of the human body deepen as her speaker reckons with chronic pain, the fight for fertility, her father-in-law’s Alzheimer’s and the death of her lover’s ex-lover. Located in the the poet’s deeply verdant and mysterious universe, each poem follows its own trajectory––a recollection of a dream or a contract with a racist stipulation––towards its own swift and startling hope. Her gift of noticing and articulating strange beauty seems more vital now than ever. “Don’t die,” she urges the reader in a poem called “The Leash,” “Even when silvery fish after fish / comes back belly up, and the country plummets / into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still / something singing?”

Ada Limón has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Today she serves on the faculty of the Queens University of Charlotte’s low-residency MFA program and the 24Pearl Street online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. In addition to her teaching and creative work she is a freelance writer, splitting her time between Lexington, Kentucky and Sonoma, California.