Startlement - by Ada Limón (Hardcover)

About the Book

"New and selected poems by Ada Limâon, 24th Poet Laureate of the United States"--

Book Synopsis

A New York Times Notable

Featured on NPR'S "Fresh Air"

A Los Angeles Times "Most Anticipated"

"Startlement is a book of rare treasures. With lyrical mastery and intimate storytelling, Limón's poetry reveals new ways of paying attention. This powerful collection is a gift."--Amy Tan

An essential collection spanning nearly twenty years of emphatic, fearlessly original poetry from one of America's most celebrated living writers.

Drawing from six previously published books--including widely acclaimed collections The Hurting Kind, The Carrying, and Bright Dead Things--as well as vibrant new work, Startlement exalts the mysterious. With a tender curiosity, Ada Limón wades into potent unknowns--the strangeness of our brief human lives, the ever-changing nature of the universe--and emerges each time with new revelations about our place in the world.

Both a lush overview of her work and a powerful narrative of a poet's life, this curation embodies Limón's capacity for "deep attention," her "power to open us up to the wonder and awe that the world still inspires" (The New York Times). From the chaos of youthful desire, to the waxing of love and loss, to the precarity of our environment, to the stars and beyond, Limón's poetry bears witness to the arc of all we know with patient lyricism and humble wonder.

"A poet of ecstatic revelation" (Tracy K. Smith), Limón encourages us to meet our shared futures with open and hungry hearts, assuring "What we are becoming, we are / becoming together."

Review Quotes

Praise for Startlement

"With a voice that is charming and warmly personal, Limón offers work across a gratifying variety of forms and pays scrupulous attention to her readers. Her best poems are garrulous, funny and heart-on-sleeve even when being a little wicked."--New York Times Editor's Choice

"This volume of new and selected poems by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States lucidly illuminates moments of beauty and peculiarity, intimacy and loneliness, experienced in the natural world and in the course of everyday living."--The New Yorker, "Best Books of the Year"

"With Startlement, Limón demonstrates her brilliance, gathering 21 new poems and 102 from her previous books, all of which precisely observe life with emotional clarity.'"--Minnesota Star Tribune

"Ada Limón . . . conveys the natural world's beauty and delights in her gorgeous Startlement: New and Selected Poems. Isn't it a joy that one of our finest wordsmiths knows talk has its limits, that phrases can't precisely convey the chatter of birds or how wind hums?" --Garden & Gun

"Breathtaking. . . . Read aloud and be awed."--Alta Magazine

"The U.S. poet laureate's seventh collection of poetry is rooted in the land, but gives voice to the transcendent. The compendium features selections from Limón's first six books, along with an entirely new collection of her word magic."--Los Angeles Times, "30 books to read this fall"

"Limón continues to wade into the unknown, including the 'strangeness of our brief human lives, the ever-changing nature of the universe and emerges each time with new revelations about our place in the world.'" --USA Today

"Limón has established herself as a lyricist of enrapturing narrative, astonishing intimacy, and unmatched insight into quotidian connections between human and animal worlds across her six widely acclaimed collections. . . . A fine testament to the life's work of a poet for our times."--Booklist, starred review

"Limón's ability to connect the individual to the universal is fully displayed here. . . . An essential choice for any collection of modern American poetry."--Library Journal, starred review

"Limón captures the mind and soul with exquisite linguistic mastery and vision that will compel readers to earmark every other sentence. Limón raises the standards for elegy, needling the heart with surgical, diaphanous, and cathartic reverie."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Limón's humanity doesn't just leap off the page, it reaches out to enfold us in a warm and welcome embrace."--Bookpage

"Ada Limón's Startlement exposes a poet driven by a deep and generative curiosity. Limón has mastered the art of lucid consciousness, of paying a thoroughgoing attention to the typically ignored. While silently arguing that significance is not a function of size, she unravels profundity from the most ordinary of thoughts. This central alchemy, interjecting the mundane with the miraculous, punctuates the entire collection."--The Rumpus

"I marvel at Ada Limón's ability to weave on the page her playfulness and wisdom. Her lyricism dances. This is the poetry of a tender and compassionate human."--Joan Baez, singer-songwriter and author of When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance

"Startlement is a book of rare treasures. With lyrical mastery and intimate storytelling, Limón's poetry reveals new ways of paying attention. This powerful collection is a gift."--Amy Tan, author of The Backyard Bird Chronicles

About the Author

Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States. She is the editor of the You Are Here anthology and the author of five collections of poems, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. She's also the author of the picture book In Praise of Mystery based on the poem engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper. Limón is a MacArthur Fellow, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a TIME Woman of the Year. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review. She lives in Glen Ellen, California.