GradeSaver has published several ClassicNotes on individual poems by Ada Limón, including "How to Triumph Like a Girl," "Instructions on Not Giving Up," "The Leash," "Dead Stars," "Wife," and "The End of Poetry."
Ada Limón's poems deal with several recurring themes. Chief among these are our relationship to nature and sense of home; human needs for connection and intimacy; managing despair at personal loss, environmental crisis, and violence; and issues related to the identities she holds as a Latina woman. Often, personal details serve as a lens to a broader commentary on humanity.
Many of Limón's poems use plants, animals, and the surrounding world as this lens. "Instructions on Not Giving Up" begins with everyday images of spring trees but unites this image with human experience in a striking way, suggesting that trees' regenerating leaves after winter can be an inspiration for us, too, to overcome traumas. "Dead Stars" follows a similar trajectory, from an even humbler starting point: looking up at the constellation Orion while taking the trash out to the street, the speaker ends up on a soaring train of inspiring thought about how humans can make ourselves as great as stars by fighting for others and defending the environment. And "How to Triumph Like a Girl," as well: observations of female racehorses become a defiant feminist battle cry. In "The Leash," the catalyst from despair to resolve is Limón's dog.
Consistently, her poems follow this motion: using fellow living beings as touchstones to establish and reinforce her own aliveness. In "State Bird," a thematically key poem from Bright Dead Things, birds are the metaphor used to describe how Limón overcame her homesickness and adjusted to Kentucky life with her partner. For Limón, a key part of that aliveness is holding on to a little bit of wildness: in "Service," a urinating pitbull is her irreverent muse. And other creatures are a grounding point even when there is no hope to be found: in "Downhearted," the speaker laments the deaths of six horses in a truck fire and holds this among other despairs in her heavy heart. We explore the recurring topics of wildness and natural creatures in Limón's poetry here.
Human connection and understanding are key to Limón's poetic objectives. In "Dead Stars," her vision of human greatness is distinctly communal and filled with solidarity. She writes emotionally, vulnerably, and sometimes with direct addresses to the reader, explicitly inviting us into the poetic experience with her. Sexuality is celebrated in poems like "The Wild Divine," and the female independence she seeks in "How to Triumph Like a Girl" or "Wife" always includes room for desire and love. She uses "you" sparingly, effectively, and often ambiguously, where "you" could be her husband or the reader. The New York Times said: "That 'you' is all important in Limón’s work—a wide-open beloved who is us, of course." While occasionally bordering on erotic, this invitation to the reader is more often an appeal to humanity's commonality at large.
"The End of Poetry" wrestles with this connection more than some of her earlier poems, due to the COVID pandemic. In it, the speaker uncharacteristically dismisses all of the traditional trappings of "poetry," recognizing that poetry as an art form is never able to truly substitute for real human contact. This poem underscores the pain of pandemic isolation and makes ever more salient the need for connection present in her body of work.
While many of her poems are deeply inspiring testaments to the human spirit, others, like "The End of Poetry," struggle equally with despair. The Carrying has many poems that touch on Limón's inability to conceive a child, and ultimately, her acceptance of this fact. On the global scale, they address massive issues such as gun violence and climate change, seen in the dark opening of "The Leash." In that poem, the speaker's mind traverses bullets and pollution, briefly contemplating death, but it is her dog and her immediate surroundings that anchor the speaker to life and empower her to command her readers to survive.
Alongside planetary crises are the complexities of identity. We have touched on the feminist themes of "How to Triumph Like a Girl"; like that poem, "Wife" wrestles in a darker way with the barriers faced by women. Limón is especially intentional in balancing her deep, passionate love for her husband with her carefully earned independence as a female poet.
Similarly, Limón wrestles with her Mexican heritage: being raised in the U.S., she is situated between cultures in a way. The poem "Prickly Pear and Fisticuffs" from Bright Dead Things discloses that her older brother no longer identifies as Latino but imagines him nevertheless fist-fighting men in a bar who insult Limón's ethnicity. "The Contract Says: We'd Like the Conversation to be Bilingual" from The Carrying shares the speaker's feelings about being stereotyped in a professional context.
We discuss the political dimensions of Limón's work here. Many of these topics, from ethnicity to climate change, are often labeled political, but to Limón they are simply aspects of being human, of seeking human connection. So, the political topics are woven throughout her poems alongside her many other themes. She observes the natural world, herself, and her relationships, and in so doing arrives at profound observations, calling her readers to be more connected and compassionate.
