 Startlement: New and Selected Poems, by Ada Limón.
Startlement includes selections from six of Ada Limón's previous books, as well as twenty-one new poems. I tend to prefer the later books, especially The Carrying. Her poetic talent is finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, looking at old things in a new way, as in the title poem: It is a forgotten pleasure, the pleasure of the unexpected blue-bellied lizard skittering off his sun spot rock, the flicker of an unknown bird by the bus stop. To think, perhaps, we are not distinguishable and therefore no loneliness can exist here. Similarly, in "Give Me This," she describes spotting a groundhog stealing and eating tomatoes out of her garden: I watched her munch and stand on her haunches, taking such pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed delight? She turns a similarly observant eye on human interactions in "A Good Story," a poem about her stepfather: But right now all I want is a story about human kindness, the way once, when I couldn't stop crying because I was fifteen and heartbroken, he came in and made me eat a small pizza he'd cut up into tiny bites until the tears stopped. Maybe I was just hungry, I said. She concludes with a new poem, "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa," dedicated to NASA's Europa mission. And it is not darkness that unites us, not the cold distance of space, but the offering of water, each drop of rain, each rivulet, each pulse, each vein. O second moon, we, too, are made of water, of vast and beckoning seas. We, too, are made of wonders, of great and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, of a need to call out through the dark. Popsugar Reading Challenge: Fruit on the cover or in the title (yes I'm counting the author's name, Spanish for lemon). 52 Book Club Challenge: Diacritical mark (such as an accent mark) on the cover.
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