Praise for Startlement

“I marvel at Ada Limón’s ability to weave on the page her playfulness and wisdom. Her lyricism dances. This is the poetry of a tender and compassionate human.”  — Joan Baez

“STARTLEMENT is a book of rare treasures. With lyrical mastery and intimate storytelling, Limón’s poetry reveals new ways of paying attention. This powerful collection is a gift.” — Amy Tan

"With six poetry collections under her belt, Ada Limón is looking back at nearly 20 years of work − drawing poems from The Hurting Kind, The Carrying and Bright Dead Things − and featuring new poems in Startlement. The Poet Laureate of the United States since 2022, Limon continues to wade into the unknown, including the 'strangeness of our brief human lives, the ever-changing nature of the universe and emerges each time with new revelations about our place in the world.'"   — USA Today

"Limón just ended two terms as the United States poet laureate, on top of a heaping pile of other accolades she has earned throughout her career. This volume of new and selected poems shows why: With a voice that is charming and warmly personal, Limón offers work across a gratifying variety of forms and pays scrupulous attention to her readers. Her best poems are garrulous, funny and heart-on-sleeve even when being a little wicked." — David Orr, New York Times Editors’ Choice

“Ada Limón, who recently completed her tenure as U.S. poet laureate, conveys the natural world’s beauty and delights in her gorgeous Startlement: New and Selected Poems. Isn’t it a joy that one of our finest wordsmiths knows talk has its limits, that phrases can’t precisely convey the chatter of birds or how wind hums? As she writes in 'Mortality': 'Language, I love it, but it is of the air / and we are of the earth.'” — Garden & Gun

"With Startlement, Limón demonstrates her brilliance, gathering 21 new poems and 102 from her previous books, all of which precisely observe life with emotional clarity. To read her is to want to keep quoting lines until people surrender and pick up her books. . . . Limón’s work illuminates the value of an individual life that might otherwise feel minuscule, as well as the moments that reveal 'how the Earth was made.'” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Limón has established herself as a lyricist of enrapturing narrative, astonishing intimacy, and unmatched insight into quotidian connections between human and animal worlds across her six widely acclaimed collections. . . . A fine testament to the life's work of a poet for our times." — Booklist, starred review

“In a retrospective spanning two decades, former U.S. poet laureate Limón captures the mind and soul with exquisite linguistic mastery and vision that will compel readers to earmark every other sentence. Limón raises the standards for elegy, needling the heart with surgical, diaphanous, and cathartic reverie." —Publishers Weekly, starred review 

“Limón’s ability to connect the individual to the universal is fully displayed here. . . . An essential choice for any collection of modern American poetry.” —Library Journal, starred review 

"If you’ve never read Limón—or much poetry at all—Startlement is the perfect place to start. This soul-nourishing collection from the MacArthur Fellow and former two-term U.S. poet laureate invites us to notice the mundane miracles all around us and the enduring threads that bind us. In dark and divisive times, we must 'hold close to the lost and the unclear,' she writes, 'and, in our own odd little way, find some refuge here.'” — BookRiot

“Throughout this well-edited book, you’ll find savvy, meaning-altering line breaks, pleasing unexpected rhymes, and formal structures that allow the poems a sense of idiosyncratic wandering before they surprisingly resolve and, as the Steely Dan song has it, fall 'together again.' Whether you know her work well or have just begun to encounter it, this book holds the mother lode.” — Forrest Gander for ALTA

“Ada Limón is one of our greatest living poets, and Startlement—which is themed around the concepts of mystery and awe—collects more than a hundred of her best pieces from previous books alongside 21 new poems. If you’ve never read Limón, this is an absolutely essential introduction to her brilliant mind. If you’re familiar with her work, the new poems and thematic structure make Startlement a vital addition to her oeuvre.” — Esquire

From the publisher: “Drawing from six previously published books—including widely acclaimed collections The Hurting Kind, The Carrying, and Bright Dead Things—as well as vibrant new work, Startlement exalts the mysterious. With a tender curiosity, Ada Limón wades into potent unknowns—the strangeness of our brief human lives, the ever-changing nature of the universe—and emerges each time with new revelations about our place in the world.

Both a lush overview of her work and a powerful narrative of a poet’s life, this curation embodies Limón’s capacity for “deep attention,” her “power to open us up to the wonder and awe that the world still inspires” (The New York Times). From the chaos of youthful desire, to the waxing of love and loss, to the precarity of our environment, to the stars and beyond, Limón’s poetry bears witness to the arc of all we know with patient lyricism and humble wonder.

“A poet of ecstatic revelation” (Tracy K. Smith), Limón encourages us to meet our shared futures with open and hungry hearts, assuring “What we are becoming, we are / becoming together.”