Like some sort of scavenger crow with an eye for shiny
things, I stumbled across this book and immediately connected with the title
and colorful, abstract cover art. The old adage of never judging a book by it’s
cover is usually true, but in this case my immediate interest paid dividends,
as Limón’s collection quickly categorized itself as a “must own” book of modern
poetry.
Limón’s poems act as a fulcrum between her relationship with
nature and her human interactions, with the emotional impact of these
connections rising and falling as the balance tilts from poem to poem, stanza
to stanza, line to line. All the while the mundane societal activities and
responsibilities we all face daily claw at this balance, seeking to tilt or
even upend her life, yet she holds to the core of herself, no matter where this
life sends her skidding like a leaf in the wind.
Many of the poems speak of the passage of time and how we
are never able to truly anticipate the major or minor shifts, the specificity
of the doldrums, the geographic or animalistic varieties of our days and
nights. She speaks of the many kinds of patients, the endless ways to wait and
suffer and survive. In each poem there are questions of self and place, remnants
of the past and future that anthropomorphize into horses or birds or trees or
the sharp tools of history or even raging fires that turn to glowing coals at
night. These things surround us. These things are us.
Her wordplay and emotional imagery are incredibly visual,
apt, and powerful, yet there’s a simmering subtly too, as if all of this is
happening behind quiet eyes and sealed lips. You’d never know it without the
written words, but there’s a world on fire in her mind and we reap the benefits
through books like these. Bright Dead
Things is gorgeous, and highly recommended.
- James H Duncan
Who is the publisher and how do we buy it?
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