The Carrying

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Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY 2019

Ada Limon is a poet of ecstatic revelation . . . a book of deep wisdom and urgent vulnerability' Tracy K. Smith, Guardian

'Vulnerable, tender, acute . . . The Carrying is a gift' Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former US Poet Laureate

'Exquisite poems' Roxane Gay

From National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Ada Limon comes The Carrying - her most powerful collection yet.

Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility - 'What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?' - and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: 'Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.' And still Limon shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. 'Fine then, / I'll take it,' she writes. 'I'll take it all.'

The Carrying leads us deeper towards the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.