The speaker comments openly on the importance place has on our lives. This is Kentucky, not New York, and I am not important. I put my apron on as a joke and waltzed around carrying a zucchini like a child. How south we were, far away in the outskirts.

In “The Last Move,” the speaker reflects: There is a loneliness associated with moving states and acclimating to new environments. This collection is deeply rooted in place while simultaneously reflecting on feelings of displacement. It is up to us to recognize the beauty of life all around. Life is full of suffering, but it is also full of beauty and small pleasures. You’ve gone to get us gas station coffee and there is so much life all over the place. This morning the sun is coming alive in the kitchen. The sound / folded me back into the airless car.” They end the animal’s suffering and drive home “under the sickle moon” but the poem does not end there:īut that was last night. When the speaker and her partner come up on a possum suffering after being hit by a vehicle, they decide to kill it “out of mercy.” The suffering, both of the possum and the speaker, is palpable: “The sound it was making. Even as we ourselves, move constantly toward death.ĭeath makes itself visible in “In the Country of Resurrection” as well. I am dying.ĭeath is all around us, even as our lives move forward. It wasn’t until later, when I moved in with him and stood outside on our patchy imperfect lawn, that I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beau- tiful. Following the death of a loved one, the speaker in “After You Toss Around the Ashes” recalls, “After it was done, I couldn’t / go back to my life.” She goes on,

Where the death of a loved one comes flooding back over margaritas at a Mexican restaurant, where animals suffer, where we leave small pleasures in old cities, and where life goes on despite all of it.īright Dead Things reminds readers to find contentment, despite the tragedies and misfortunes of life. The speaker examines her place in a varied world littered with its fried pickles, wide expanse of blue skies, fields full of fireflies and the stars they mirror.

Ada Limón’s fourth collection of poems, Bright Dead Things, faces discontentment, nostalgia, and longing in the face of a changing environment. Where the death of a loved one comes flooding back over margaritas at a Mexican restaurant, where animals suffer, where we leave small pleasures in old cities, and where life goes on despite all of it. Ada Limón’s fourth collection of poems, Bright Dead Things, faces discontentment, nostalgia, and longing in the face of a changing environment.

Bright dead things limon