NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
A 2024 NPR Books We Love Selection

Whoever you are, you will find yourself and your own world in the expansiveness of this collection.
-Margaret Renkl, New York Times

Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by fifty of our most celebrated contemporary writers.

In recent years, our poetic landscape has evolved in profound and exciting ways. So has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, this book challenges what we think we know about nature poetry, illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes-both literal and literary-are changing.

You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation's most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author's local landscape-be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop-offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.

Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what nature and poetry are today, inviting readers to experience both anew.

U.S. poet laureate, Ada Limón was invited by NASA to write a poem to be engraved on the Europa Clipper spacecraft. That poem, In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa launched to Jupiter and its moons on October 14, 2024. Reimagined as In Praise of Mystery, Limón's debut picture book, this luminous poem is illustrated by celebrated and internationally renowned artist Peter Sís.

In Praise of Mystery celebrates humankind's endless curiosity, asks us what it means to explore beyond our known world, and shows how the unknown can reflect us back to ourselves.

U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón has a keen eye for the natural world.

This poem pulses with the joyful energy of a fox bounding through backyards, piecing together a living in his own way. Paired with lush illustrations by Gaby D'Alessandro, this picture book brings Limón's work to a new generation.

Comes with its streak of red / flashing across the lawn, squirrel / bound and bouncing . . .

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bright Dead Things examines the dangerous thrill of living in a world you must leave one day and the search to find something that is disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.

A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact--tracing in intimate detail the ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Ada Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a huge beating genius machine striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying, the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous, accessible, and effortlessly lyrical (New York Times)--though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness-between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves--from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limóoacute;n.

I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers, writes Limón. I am the hurting kind. What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world's pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings--and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they do not / care to be seen as symbols?

With Limón's remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions--incorporating others' stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.

Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning's shade, writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, she is doing what she can to survive.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD

From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón 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 Limón shows us, as ever, 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, Limón 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.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The #1 bestselling and beloved poetry anthology, now in paperback!

Whoever you are, you will find yourself and your own world in the expansiveness of this collection.
-Margaret Renkl, New York Times

A lovely book to take with you to read at the end of your next hike.
-Los Angeles Times

Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by fifty of our most celebrated contemporary writers.

In recent years, our poetic landscape has evolved in profound and exciting ways. So has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, this book challenges what we think we know about nature poetry, illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes--both literal and literary--are changing.

You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation's most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author's local landscape--be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop--offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.

Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what nature and poetry are today, inviting readers to experience both anew.

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--both toward and away from us--and it is also full of risk: from sharks unexpectedly lurking beneath estuarial rivers to the dangers of New York City, where, as Limón reminds us, even rats find themselves trapped by the garbage cans they've crawled into.

In such a world, how should one proceed? Throughout Sharks in the Rivers, Limón 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 Limón, 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.

Elogio al misterio dirige una mirada hacia la infinita tela nocturna y hacia nuestro planeta viviente y nos invita a preguntarnos qué significa explorar más allá del mundo conocido.

La poesía magistral y cautivadora de la Poeta Laureada de los Estados Unidos, Ada Limón, viajará al espacio en 2024, grabada en relieve en la astronave Europe Clipper de la NASA, como parte de una misión cuyo fin es el estudio de la segunda luna de Júpiter para determinar si existen las condiciones necesarias para sustentar la vida. Se ve acompañada por el imaginario luminoso de Peter Sís, el artista ganador del Premio Hans Christian Andersen, en un libro ilustrado que celebra la curiosidad y el asombro interminable de la humanidad.

Now in paperback! With over 60,000 hardcover copies in print, the astonishing collection about interconnectedness--between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves--from U.S. Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow Ada Limón.

I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers, writes Limón. I am the hurting kind. What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world's pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings-and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they do not / care to be seen as symbols?

With Limón's remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions-incorporating others' stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.

Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning's shade, writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, she is doing what she can to survive.

An essential collection spanning nearly twenty years of emphatic, fearlessly original poetry from one of America's most celebrated living writers.

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, 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.

La Poeta Laureada estadounidense Ada Limón tiene un ojo perspicaz para el entorno natural.

Este poema late con la alegre energía de un zorro que brinca por patios traseros buscándose la vida a su manera. Acompañado de hermosas ilustraciones de Gaby D'Alessandro, este libro ilustrado acerca la obra de Limón a una nueva generación.

Viene con su rayo de rojo / que cruza el césped / en pos de una ardilla...

U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón has a keen eye for the natural world.

This poem pulses with the joyful energy of a fox bounding through backyards, piecing together a living in his own way. Paired with lush illustrations by Gaby D'Alessandro, this picture book brings Limón's work to a new generation.

Comes with its streak of red / flashing across the lawn, squirrel / bound and bouncing . . .