Ada Limón (born March 28, 1976, in Sonoma, California) is an acclaimed American poet and the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, appointed in 2022. She is celebrated for her deeply emotional and vividly imagistic poetry that explores themes of nature, identity, love, loss, and resilience. Limón earned her MFA from the creative writing program at New York University and has published several award-winning poetry collections, including Bright Dead Things (a National Book Award finalist), The Carrying (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), and The Hurting Kind.
Her poems often balance tenderness and strength, merging the natural world with human experience. She writes with a conversational yet lyrical voice, revealing vulnerability and fierce honesty. Limón’s language is accessible but layered with emotional depth, turning ordinary moments—like tending to a garden or observing a horse—into meditations on existence and belonging.
As Poet Laureate, she has worked to make poetry more visible and connected to everyday life, notably through projects that integrate poetry with public spaces. Ada Limón’s work continues to inspire readers with its compassion, clarity, and belief in poetry’s power to heal and connect.Today we will read her three poems.Privacy
Ada Limón (born March 28, 1976, in Sonoma, California) is an acclaimed American poet and the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, appointed in 2022. She is celebrated for her deeply emotional and vividly imagistic poetry that explores themes of nature, identity, love, loss, and resilience. Limón earned her MFA from the creative writing program at New York University and has published several award-winning poetry collections, including Bright Dead Things (a National Book Award finalist), The Carrying (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), and The Hurting Kind.
Her poems often balance tenderness and strength, merging the natural world with human experience. She writes with a conversational yet lyrical voice, revealing vulnerability and fierce honesty. Limón’s language is accessible but layered with emotional depth, turning ordinary moments—like tending to a garden or observing a horse—into meditations on existence and belonging.
As Poet Laureate, she has worked to make poetry more visible and connected to everyday life, notably through projects that integrate poetry with public spaces. Ada Limón’s work continues to inspire readers with its compassion, clarity, and belief in poetry’s power to heal and connect.Today we will read her three poems.
Privacy
On the black wet branches of the linden,
still clinging to umber leaves of late fall,
two crows land. They say, “Stop,” and still I want
to make them into something they are not.
Odin’s ravens, the bruja’s eyes. What news
are they bringing of our world to the world
of the gods? It can’t be good. More suffering
all around, more stinging nettles and toxic
blades shoved into the scarred parts of us,
the minor ones underneath the trees. Rain
comes while I’m still standing, a trickle of water
from whatever we believe is beyond the sky.
The crows seem enormous but only because
I am watching them too closely. They do not
care to be seen as symbols. A shake of a wing,
and both of them are gone. There was no message
given, no message I was asked to give, only
their great absence and my sad privacy
returning like the bracing, empty wind
on the black wet branches of the linden.
Salvage
On the top of Mount Pisgah, on the western
slope of the Mayacamas, there’s a madrone
tree that’s half-burned from the fires, half-alive
from nature’s need to propagate. One side
of her is black ash and at her root is what
looks like a cavity that was hollowed out
by flame. On the other side, silvery green
broadleaf shoots ascend toward the winter
light and her bark is a cross between a bay
horse and a chestnut horse, red and velvety
like the animal’s neck she resembles. I have
been staring at the tree for a long time now.
I am reminded of the righteousness I had
before the scorch of time. I miss who I was.
I miss who we all were, before we were this: half
alive to the brightening sky, half dead already.
I place my hand on the unscarred bark that is cool
and unsullied, and because I cannot apologize
to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry.
I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.
FULL GALLOP
The night after, I dream I chop
all the penises off, the ones that
keep coming through the walls.
Tied in sweat-wet sheets, I wake
aching, how I’ve longed for touch
for so much of my bodied time.
In the shower later, I notice new
layers I’ve grown, softness love tosses
you after years of streetlights alone.
I will never harm you, your brilliant
skin I rub against in the night,
still, part of me is haunted—
a shadow baying inside me
who wants to snap her hind leg
back, buck the rider, follow
that fugitive call into oblivion.
Give Me This
I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.
