(Milkweed Editions, 2018)

REVIEW BY JOURNEY WILA MCANDREWS

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Poet Ada Limón reveals what it is like for her to live with chronic pain, infertility, and an increasing sense that she will eventually surrender to death. Her new collection of poetry The Carrying is her most intimate work yet, one that adeptly portrays the fragility and fierceness of her body.

In the poem “Wonder Woman,” Limón speaks specifically of her “raging battle” with her vertigo and spinal discomfort, and she observes how “invisible pain is both a blessing and a curse” because she still appears “happy” as she suffers. Then she describes her enthusiasm in seeing a young woman walk down the street dressed in a Wonder Woman costume, and how the young woman “bowed and posed like she knew I needed a myth, a woman, by a river, indestructible.”

For Limón, her body is a complex contradiction that alternates between power and limitation. And what about her mental health? The poet carries a lot of pain here as well. Panic attacks, grief, loss, enduring social injustices, fear of dying, and financial woes that manifest in a “barely enough” bank account. And yet Limón’s mental strength emerges through her determination to confront political and social atrocities thrust upon her and others by those who hold the majority of America’s power and wealth.

Limón is cognizant of how political and social unrest coincide with her physical and psychological distress. Her vertigo, infertility, and panic attacks comingle with an existential crisis that underlines her attempt to find purpose and meaning in everyday experiences. In finding this meaning the poet uncovers moments of occasional hope in a world fraught with unfathomable violence. Consider the unnerving opening lines in the poem “The Leash,” in which Limón writes:

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear, / the frantic automatic weapons

unleashed, / the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands, / that brute sky

opening in a slate-metal maw / that swallows only the unsayable in each of us,

what’s left?

Amid daily acts of injustice and violence in America and the ever-looming threat of more carnage, what’s left for the poet? Gardening. Tending to an in-law with Alzheimer’s. Adopting aging cats after her partner’s ex-girlfriend dies. Naming trees and snakes. Being in love and being loved. And slowly, yet reluctantly, embracing the role of a “Wife”—who feels that she “isn’t good at even that.”

Just as the trees described throughout The Carrying shed their leaves in the fall—a sort of rebirth in the act of dying, Limón unburdens herself of what she has been made to carry, which includes fear and concern over America’s immigration laws—which often manifests itself through the poet’s exploration of places of origin and places of belonging. In “Ancestors” Limón identifies nature as her place of origin:

I’ve come here from the rocks, the bone-like chert, / obsidian, lava rock. I’ve

come here from the trees— / chestnut, bay laurel, toyon, acacia, redwood, cedar, /

one thousand oaks that bend with moss and old-man’s beard.

Towards the end of “Ancestors” she observes the power that comes from having roots, which signifies belonging to a place, but then pivots the tone of the poem when she writes:

Imagine you must survive / without running? / I’ve come from the lacing

patterns of leaves, / I do not know where else I belong.   

For Limón, home is where she resides with her dog, her partner, two aging cats, and three snakes she’s names “so no one is tempted to kill them.” And home is also a geographical location in a city within a nation where the poet is rooted. In “Ancestors” Limón contrasts having a home and roots with the knowledge that a life “without running” is unlikely for immigrants in America now that ICE regularly appears unannounced at their homes and places of employment, declaring them illegal, detaining them, then tagging them for return to their counties of origin—as though they were misdirected cargo that arrived in America by mistake.

But how can it be a mistake for people to flee violence in one country for the promise of building better lives in another country? And how is it lawful that these same people who fled violence are met with more violence in the county they have escaped to? Especially when we consider (as Limón reminds us in “Ancestors”) that some immigrants have been in America so long that they “do not know where else” they belong.

In “Against Belonging” Limón speaks of shaking off citizenship and then drawing “her own signature with her body in whatever dirt she wants.” But she knows doing so puts her in danger because her “brownness” is subject to search and seizure under American’s present immigration laws.

In the poem “Cargo,” Limón reveals that she now travels with her passport because of ICE raids that threaten her safety no matter where she goes—in Kentucky or California, while enduring yet another TSA pat-down, on a drive to and from the fertility clinic, or for the hour she “sat alone in the car by the post office and just was,” which she describes in the poem “The Vulture & The Body.”

Although current U.S. immigration laws are absurdly fixated on deciding who can rightfully call America home, in “Of Roots & Roamers” Limón urges us to find common ground, and to create a sense of safety even we do not share the same political or cultural points of view.

Even when we can’t agree on much, / there’s still the man returning from his /

late shift at the local bar, who takes / a long look at the bird’s nest in the maple,/

pats the trunk like a friend’s forearm, / mumbles something about staying safe /

and returns home.

The poem “Of Roots and Roamers” illustrates how some people are firmly rooted in a place, while others arrive at a place by itinerant means. And since so much of America belongs to the people, or “trees” as the poet calls them in this poem, then isn’t it for the people to decide when to roam and when to put down roots?

Moreover, in “Of Roots and Roamers” Limón extends the motif of finding meaning in everyday experiences that exist outside political and social regulation, as exemplified in the man returning home after a late shift at a local bar and his act of pausing to acknowledge the life that surrounds him. In this reality, the man’s gesture of patting a tree trunk “like a friend’s forearm” can easily translate to the man touching his neighbors, friends, animals, loved ones, and immigrants with his kindness, and to him actively assisting in their safe passage in whatever place they call home.

And yet, Limón reminds us in “Bust” that another reality consists of aggressive pat-downs while moving in “a sleepy stream through the radiation machine” and “heading somewhere else before the world has even woken up.” She also argues that towing the line for the sake of national security supersedes our individual freedoms and is a form of control that “pushes us down squeezing out the body’s air.”

With so much talk of loss, grief, and injustice, does Limón believe there is still hope for America? Her response to this question (found in the poem “The Leash”) is yes and no, when she pleads with the reader not to die, “even when silvery fish after fish comes back belly up, and the country plummets into a crepitating crater of hatred, then she asks, “Isn’t there still something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.”

Despite not knowing if finding meaning is enough to help her contend with emotional and physical burdens, Limón challenges us to continue looking within and to one another for the courage to fight forces that seek to separate and defeat us. In “Dead Stars” she writes:

Look, we are not unspectacular things. / We’ve come this far, survived this much.

What/ would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder? / What if we

stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No. / No, to the rising tides. /

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

The Carrying is a blunt exploration of loss, and wisely observant of how “real gladness” and pain manifest in both animals and humans. Limón’s poems personify the twinned-narrative of despair and tenacity that has become part of America’s current political and social reality. Indeed, The Carrying is a spark of courage in our dark and troubled times, one that implores us to remain awake so we can remake our toughest selves “while everyone else is asleep.”

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Journey Wila McAndrews is a Kentucky-born writer and community organizer/activist. Her passion for social justice led her to become a National Community Scholar in the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan. She spends her week traveling back and forth along the “Hillbilly Highway”—an expanse of road running from Kentucky through Ohio to Michigan. Journey is grateful for her Appalachian roots, and when she isn’t working to address social injustices, she’s writing poetry and nonfiction in solitude on her family’s farm in rural Kentucky. Her feature stories, poems, book reviews, and prose have appeared in LILIPOH Magazine, Appalachian Heritage, Kudzu Literary Magazine, The Feminist Wire, Kentucky Monthly Magazine, and the What Rough Beast project at Indolent Books. Contact Journey Wila McAndrews at: https://www.journeymcandrews.com/contact.html