The Carrying : Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY 2019Ada Limón 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 GayFrom National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Ada Limón 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 Limón 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.