Book Review: BRIGHT DEAD THINGS by Ada Limón
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Bright Dead Things Poems by Ada Limón |
| Milkweed Editions $16.00 |
In 2010 a classmate handed me Limón’s first collection, lucky wreck, published by Autumn House Press, in the college dining hall. The classmate thumbed through the thin pages and pointed to her underline, the beginning of “First Lunch With Relative Stranger Mister You” which begins, “We solved the problem of the wind / with an orange. / Now we’ve got the problem / of the orange.” Because I had just come into poetry and because it was a sad year and because this classmate, who was schizophrenic, wrote the most beautifully unrealistic images in her own poems, I saved Limón’s words. I now work for Autumn House and haven’t heard from that classmate in over four years, but I still think of our orange moment. Of how answers are fleeting, how we are thrust next to people who are equally broken and bright. Now, I hold Limón’s newest collection, Bright Dead Things, and it feels inevitable—these poems solving our impossible need for answers.
The collection is divided into four sections and we follow the speaker as she defines her place during a move from New York City to Kentucky, the loss of her stepmother, nostalgia, and falling into love. Each transition awakens new problems, but we’re reminded that within each problem we persist—we are still willing to whisper in the darkest of rooms, to still exist.
In the first poems of the collection, I watch the speaker fight against gender constraints, questions of “the roll of the woman” suddenly sparked by a move into a more conservative, southern state. These lines are heated with a power struggle, a defense against silence, a kinship with the forceful and fearless parts of nature. Most obvious in “How To Triumph Like A Girl” the collection opener, where the speaker details her affection for female horses. She writes,
…As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,…
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see…
The need to be animalistic stretches beyond the Kentucky landscape. In “I Remember the Carrots” the speaker remembers herself as a child, how she would rip carrots out of the ground, breaking their roots, ruining her father’s crop. She called them her “bright dead things.” Now, she tries to be “nice” but resents this desire, ending the poem on this line: “What I mean is: there are days / I still want to kill the carrots because I can.” Sometimes, we want to act without hesitation, to be an animal, to not be quiet and polite and it’s this tension—this wanting without action—that creates the friction within Limón’s poems.
We trek through the complicated mourning of death, in which the speaker navigates her sorrow with survival, writes,
But love is impossible and it goes on
despite the impossible. You’re the muscle
I cut from the bone and still the bone
remembers, still it wants (so much, it wants)
the flesh back, the real thing,
if only to rail against it….
In these moments nature serves as a reflection of our own human impulses. In a poem about silence, about paying respect for those bullied by hate crimes, Limón ends with a peacock “screaming, at first harmless, / then like some far-off siren.” Even nature, usually described as delicate and beautiful, can be a warning, a “bright dead thing.” Oddly, I’m reassured by this, for no single moment is entirely one thing—no brightness is ever endlessly light, no death forever dark. We will move on to the next moment and it will be equally complex, as Limón utters “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.”