Bright Dead Things

In her newest volume of poems, Limón (Sharks in the Rivers) delves into the divided self—self separated by geography, by loss, by change, by circumstance. In "Torn," she says "something/ that loves itself so much it moves across/ the boundaries of death to touch itself/ once more, to praise both divided sides/ equally…." Limón's landscape is Brooklyn, California, and the horsey and blue-grassy hills of Kentucky, and her writing is intensely intimate and wild, softly sensual and bold. In the mostly lyric narratives, with an occasional prose poem included, loss and redemption are apparent, and love—whether tough love or easy love—is resilient. "How good it is to love/ live things, even when what they've done/ is terrible, how much we each want to be…turned loose/ into our own wide open without a single/ harness of sin to stop us."