Bright Dead Things

A Finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award
A Best Poetry Book of 2015: New York Times and Buzzfeed

'In Bright Dead Things, there's a fierce jazz and sass . . . and there's sadness - a grappling with death and loss that forces the imagination to a deep response . . . Yet the heart seeks love, risk, and strangeness - and finds it everywhere' Gregory Orr

Bright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately 'disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.'

A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, Limón considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact - tracing in intimate detail the various ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a 'huge beating genius machine' striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. 'I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,' the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous and accessible - though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.