"Dead Stars" is rooted in a domestic setting while simultaneously transcending it. What would this poem be without its backdrop of thunderous trash bins, waxy recycling bin, and streetlight glow? It is easy to focus on the stars and hopes for a better world as the "point" of the poem, and they are where its meaning coalesces, but these heights are impressive in large part because of how far the poem stretches from its mundane setting to reach them. Moreover, "Dead Stars" offers an example, among Ada Limón's other works, of how the boundary between the domestic (home) and outside world can be a valuable portal to profound thought.
Suburbia does not receive a particularly flattering treatment in the start of this poem. "Out here," the poem starts, there is "bowing," "Winter's icy hand," and "stillness." The speaker begins the poem feeling bent over and weighed down by winter and life. She is a "hearth of spiders" and "nest of trying" in line 5, marking the domestic home as a place of animalistic labor and effort. We can't help but feel a sense of futility from it. Perhaps we should feel sorry for the speaker? Line 7's image—"the rolling [trash] containers a song of suburban thunder"—deepens the sense that this suburban setting straddles the line between beautiful and pathetic. "It's almost romantic," the speaker says, though the image of a "waxy blue / recycling bin" that follows is hardly what we expect to be "romantic."
This mood of constraint and confinement is crucial. It means that we as readers feel the contrast starkly when, after line 13 onward, the speaker broadens her scope dramatically to visions of the world at large.
However, Limón does not outright disparage or dismiss suburbia. As a setting, it has immense value, even if it is primarily something to be transcended en route to higher ideas. Limón returns to the trash cans in the very last line of the poem, which helps the poem come full circle and feel complete. Moreover, it reinforces that the domestic setting is a valuable home base, a grounding point from which to look up and out at the bigger world.
Specifically, we see how Ada Limón is interested in the threshold (or boundary) between the domestic and the outside world (both nature and society). This poem takes place at the curb: the meeting point between private and public property. Rolling your trash out to the street, she reminds us, is as great a time as any to pause and think deeply about your life! It even appears elsewhere in the book The Carrying. In the poem "It's Harder," Limón discusses the ambiguity in the actions of men, including her husband. She spies on a private moment of his:
a black garbage can rolled out so slowly
he hovers there, outside, alone, a little longer
Perhaps what allows the speaker to share this moment of reflection with her husband in "Dead Stars" is that he, too, intuitively understands the value of this threshold as a spot for reflection, as "It's Harder" shows.
Two of her other most popular poems take place on the street just outside her house, as well: "The Leash" and "Instructions on Not Giving Up." (Both were conceived while walking her dog). The domestic suburban setting is hidden in plain sight as a remarkably consistent feature of these poems. "The Leash" is a runaway train of thought, pondering climate catastrophe and gun violence, but the immediacy of her dog walk anchors and keeps her from plummeting into despair. She observes:
the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain
Limón's poems demonstrate two complementary truths about the domestic scene:
First, that poetry can and does emerge from things as mundane as recycling bins and garage doors. This is a relief for aspiring poets who feel they "have nothing to write about" in the lack of dramatic life events: Limón shows that inspiration surrounds us.
Second, she shows that this domestic setting can inspire but need not constrain us. Her poems use the domestic as a jumping-off point to reflect upon the biggest and deepest questions of life and the world.
As a feminist poet as well, Limón troubles the usual assumptions about a woman's relationship to the "domestic." (Her feminism is a topic further explored in "How to Triumph Like a Girl" and elsewhere). An important undercurrent of "Dead Stars" is its emphasis on largeness: the speaker leans "toward / what's larger within us," and imagines if we "made ourselves so big" as to be like constellations. For a woman of color, especially, her desire to take up space defies the expectation that a woman should be as small (physically and symbolically) as possible. She is confined by neither her domestic setting nor her gender, without disowning either.
Limón has spoken extensively about the tension she has felt with her adopted home, Lexington, Kentucky, where she did not initially want to move but has since grown to love. In this context, it makes sense that some of her best work grows out of exploring the boundaries of "home." Learning about her new home in Kentucky, and writing so often from its threshold, has inspired a more frequent focus on nature. In dissolving the boundary of the domestic, "Dead Stars" acknowledges nature's presence and enables the turn in lines 20-25 toward environmental justice. In conversation with Smithsonian magazine, Ada Limón reflected:
We live within nature … even in urban settings, in the small pocket parks that are in between freeways. To live in that community and to live in that interconnectedness, I hope, will help us see our lives as reciprocal with nature.
"Dead Stars" transcends the suburban domestic to arrive at precisely this interconnectedness.
