Limon, who has now published seven books of poetry served as the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate from 2022 to 2025, the first Latina woman to be so honored.  Her many honors include being named a MacArthur Fellow, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner for her 2018 collection, “The Carrying” and the poet whose original poem, “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission was engraved in her own handwriting on a metal plate affixed to the Europa Clipper spacecraft. The Europa Clipper launched on October 14, 2024, and is expected to arrive in the Jupiter system in 2030, where it will perform flybys of Jupiter’s Galilean moon, Europa.

I did not know her work until reading “Startlement” which was a gift from one of my daughters.  I always struggle with how to read a book comprising one poet’s work, either ‘collected’ or ‘selected’.  Does one plow through from first to last poem? Does one dip into the book here and there from time to time?

In this case, I began at the beginning and eventually read straight through. It was not easy since her earliest poems were complex and difficult.  However, as the selections moved through her prior six books, I found the work more accessible and beautiful, and the final section of new poems was the best. Limon writes primarily about her childhood with her Mexican-American grandparents and extended family in Sonoma, California.  Later poems address the beauty of nature in her other home, Kentucky.

A Podcast interview with Limon was printed in the Sunday NYT Book Review on April 26th.  In it she is quoted as saying “I think the first way the reciprocal relationship (between poet and reader) begins with poetry is you share it.  If a poem moves you, it should be shared. The beautiful thing about poetry is that it just moves one poem at a time. You don’t even have to give a whole book. Al you have to do is send, sometimes even a line.”  

So here is a poem from her book that I’d like to share with you.  Its title is “Privacy”:

On the black wet branches of the linden,
still clinging to umber leaves of late fall,
two crows land. They say, “Stop,” and still I want
to make them into something they are not.
Odin’s ravens, the bruja’s eyes. What news
are they bringing of our world to the world
of the gods? It can’t be good. More suffering
all around, more stinging nettles and toxic
blades shoved into the scarred parts of us,
the minor ones underneath the trees. Rain
comes while I’m still standing, a trickle of water
from whatever we believe is beyond the sky.
The crows seem enormous but only because
I am watching them too closely. They do not
care to be seen as symbols. A shake of a wing,
and both of them are gone. There was no message
given, no message I was asked to give, only
their great absence and my sad privacy
returning like the bracing, empty wind
on the black wet branches of the linden.