Startlement: New and Selected Poems
Limón’s characteristic voice is casual, even chatty...and warmly personal ... Gratifyingly varied in its structures ... Limón’s best work displays, to borrow a line from the Irish poet Medbh McGuckian, 'a kind of flying-heartedness' — it’s garrulous, funny and heart-on-sleeve even when being a little wicked ... The aggressively colloquial presentation allows Limón to set some much pricklier ideas in play ... The revelation at the end feels appropriate, and the nicely judged consonance ('kill,' 'carrots,' 'can') underscores it ... Limón’s attentiveness to readers is a considerable strength; it can also be a weakness. Her writing sometimes seems eager not simply to speak to her audience, but to actively court it ... But if Limón’s writing can at times lead her audience by the hand, at least it provides steady, capable guidance.
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Startlement is not a retrospective but rather a vehicle for considering Limón’s career anew ... She is writing with eyes wide open, in other words, not to deliver a message but to address some necessary question, to puzzle out a matter of concern. Poetry as action, writing as an excavation, the line of words like a winding path on which the poet may discover something about herself ... The result is work in which form and function are inextricably connected, in which meaning derives from both the substance and the structure of the poem.
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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 ... Limón’s older work reaps epiphanies from memory...and the natural world...and recent poems...continue that arc.
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