WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD ALA NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD From National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limon comes The Carrying - her most powerful collection yet. Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility - What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?" - and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: "Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal." And still Limon shows us, asever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. "Fine then, / I'll take it," she writes. "I'll take it all." In Bright Dead Things, Limon showed us a heart "giant with power, heavy with blood" - "the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it's going to come in first." In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full display - even as The Carrying continues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world." | The Carrying by Ada Limon, Paperback | Indigo Chapters