Introducing The Carrying
“I don’t know how to hold this truth, / so I kill it, pin its terrible wings down / in case, later, no one believes me.” 
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, an honor bestowed on the “finest books published in English,” Ada Limón’s fifth poetry collection, The Carrying, is perhaps her most personal to date. Split into three sections, the poet’s inability to enact one specific type of carrying unifies the collection, the ability to carry a child. In a beautifully poetic, ironic twist, Limón’s struggle with infertility births a deep rumination on where motherhood finds its outlets in our lives when we are denied a child. Equal parts terrified (see “The Leash” or “A New National Anthem”), tender (see “What I Didn’t Know Before”) and hopeful (see “Instructions on Not Giving Up”), Limón paints a portrait of a woman, and a nation, struggling to accept that, as she says in “Carrying,” “we are all meant for something.” It just may not be what we thought it would, or want it to, be. 
When Limón is at her most hypocritical, her most complex, her most Whitman-esque (“I am large, I contain multitudes”), she unleashes the zenith of her humanity. The core of this collection is a benign sense of curiosity: looking at the world, external and internal, and asking questions about it. Painting pain as a curse in one moment and a blessing in the next, The Carrying reads like an ode to the complexity and depth of emotion, with Limón’s fertility issues riding beneath each poem like a gentle lighthouse guiding us through the maelstrom of human experience. 
Motherhood is redefined in this collection as the urge to create: “I can’t stop / putting plants in the ground. There’s a hunger in me, // a need to watch something grow,” she writes in “Sway.” She writes about the urge to create both life and also meaning, a theme represented by the desire to name and be named. Limón seems to ask, do we claim what we name? Is to name something to strip it of freedom, or are we giving a form to a formless entity? When we ask to be named, are we asking to be seen, to be accepted? As Limón herself says in a 2018 interview with Bomb Magazine: “The idea of putting words to the ultimately unsayable is fundamentally the poet’s insurmountable task. But there’s also a hubris to it as well, isn’t there? Who am I to name anything?” In The Carrying, Limón does not answer these questions, she raises them, and leaves them to float in the ether of our collective curiosity, gently asking the reader to join her in wondering. In the opening poem “A Name,” we are re-introduced to the original mother, Eve. Little is certain about this woman of myth, the notorious first woman, except her name. Yet in this poem, as she takes on a godlike authority and names the world’s creatures- nightingale, red-shouldered hawk, fiddler crab, fallow deer- she implores them to respond: “[she] looked into / their wide wonderful eyes and / whispered, name me, name me.”
Despite hardship, the pull to create is strong in Limón, and The Carrying is the fruit of her toils. Her language is sweet and intimate, never claiming to know more than her readers. She pulls us into her life, her struggles, and her questions, befriending us with colloquialisms and helping us expand our own minds as she bravely leads the way.
-Abby Edgecumbe