What is it poets are for these days? Increasingly, in a world where brevity matters, verse makers are anywhere words are under pressure—which is everywhere. At school, in church, in the town square. It’s not an accident that Audre Lorde’s and Adrienne Rich’s lines decorate protest marches. Their poems were, after all, the record of revolutionary consciousness. Now, of course, the town square is online, too, where snapshots of powerful poems churn the world. Poets, not surprisingly, are good at Twitter, too. Giving a poet a 280-character restriction is like giving a dog a bone.
Not all poetry is public, though. In fact, even poetry addressed to us, toward us, the reader, depends on privacy. It depends on partial viewership, on interiority, on hour upon hour of time spent alone, out of which comes, perhaps, just one poem. In a world of hacking and constant drilling for social capital, the poet who can offer us the feeling of lived experience backlit by intimacy without giving (or demanding) everything—without selling us on his or her or their selves—is offering something so precious that the word luxury comes to mind. Were that word not so degraded by its attachment to goods alone.
One of the most dependable providers of this feeling is Ada Limón, whose forthcoming collection, , will be published in May. Like Sharon Olds and Pablo Neruda, the poets she most resembles, and clearly learned from, Limón is a lover. She writes like a hyperporous lover of the world. She loves the