Sharks in the Rivers

The speaker in this extraordinary collection finds herself multiply dislocated: from her childhood in California, from her family's roots in Mexico, from a dying parent, from her prior self. The world is always in motion and it is also full of risk.

In such a world, how should one proceed? Throughout Sharks in the Rivers, Limon suggests that we must cleave to the world as it 'keep[s] opening before us,' for, if we pay attention, we can be one with its complex, ephemeral, and beautiful strangeness. Loss is perpetual, and each person's mouth 'is the same / mouth as everyone's, all trying to say the same thing.' For Limon, it's the saying - individual and collective - that transforms each of us into 'a wound overcome by wonder,' that allows 'the wind itself' to be our 'own wild whisper'.

These poems exhale the cosmic force of love -- Jennifer L. Knox
Ada Limón is a poet of alchemy, able to transform herself into what is named as she utters the words - hummingbird, river, desire, gone. With Sharks in the Rivers she has created the thing itself, alternating rangy invocations with distilled wildness, always open to wonder -- Nick Flynn
Ada Limón's poems invite me into a consciousness that is always waking up, and always, despite everything that happens, choosing to step in, rather than away. This is a wonderful book -- Bob Hicok
Vigour, intensity, and informality mark the volatile free verse of this collection . . . These sinewy odes, sexy glimpses and visionary reminiscences should appeal to readers who treasure the work of Jack Gilbert Publishers Weekly

Ada Limon is the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate as well as the author of The Hurting Kind and five other collections of poems. These include, most recently, The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limon is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review, among others. She is the former host of American Public Media's weekday poetry podcast The Slowdown. Born and raised in California, she now lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

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