Sharks in the Rivers

"This is the way/ the world runs through us, its instruments of moon—/ water and hangnails of hope." In her third collection (after Lucky Wreck and This Big Fake World), Limón does let the world run through us, transporting us among landscapes, both real and imagined: urban/rural, East/West, and modern/mythological. Limón aptly uses repetition in language and syntax to strengthen her lines, and her images, which range from birds to fish, both carry and confound the reader. Think of M.C. Escher's print in which fish rise from water to become birds. In Limón's world, there is transcendence in change and a way "to affirm our existence." A centerpiece of the book is a series of 15 poems in which the author visits the myth of Huitzilopochtli, an Aztec god whose father was a ball of feathers—and the hummingbird who "taught her to weave/ …that weaving saved her life."