Ada Limon’s Startlement: New and Selected Poems exposes a poet driven by a deep and generative curiosity. Limon has mastered the art of lucid consciousness, of paying a thoroughgoing attention to the typically ignored. While silently arguing that significance is not a function of size, she unravels profundity from the most ordinary of thoughts. This central alchemy, interjecting the mundane with the miraculous, punctuates the entire collection.
Reading Limon positions me at the center of her interrogations, as the collected work, comprising 123 poems with 12 formerly unpublished poems, shifts between themes of fragility, connectivity, and continuance. “Why this interruption, soaked to the bone?” She asks in “Diagnosis: Even the Stillaguamish River Cannot Stop Time,” querying what is consequential. Startlement makes a compelling case for artistic integrity over time. It demonstrates that as Limon matures, her foundational style—a conversational diction that houses a profound mix of awe and disquiet—only sharpens its ability to confront complex existential and ecological questions.
Startlement allows us to read the strata of Limón’s career, a bedrock aesthetic that discloses her process of distillation in a conversational diction that holds the awe and disquiet present in early collections like Lucky Wreck (2006) and her award-winning collections, Bright Dead Things (2015) and The Hurting Kind (2022). Her work, especially in this collected work, carries a sensibility that allows her to excavate the existential from the everyday. Nowhere is this clearer than in her treatment of the phenomenal world, where she consistently blurs the line between subject and object, diagnosing the moods of “sullen lamps” and revealing the secret life of “mountains like a sleeping woman.”
As poets, at times, all you need to do is observe from a distance, taking into cognisance that you’re a small part of a big world, sifting through the noise—eavesdropping on nature and neighbours—scrutinizing trends, memory, and language, reaching for the unseen and unspoken, the uncelebrated. Ada’s storytelling can be painstakingly slow and suspenseful, weaving through multiple plots and timelines. But it never fails to engage. And it brings seemingly unrelated pieces together. In “A Little Distantly, As One Should” the poet persona distracts herself from writing about accidents, watching the neighbors make a barbecue in preparation for the arrival of guests, but can’t wave off the memory of a brother who died in an accident. The narrative is in fragments, moving between recollection and the immediate, reflecting the persona’s emotional dislocation. She notices/recalls trivial details, like vests, songs, lateness of guests, and a childhood crush whose name time has distorted. She recounts the unusual roads that lead to Lake Tahoe, and how strange the station wagon feels.
…Station wagons for all their air
of safety always feel unsafe to me.
The way nuclear family should sound
comforting and yet it only ever sounds
like something that’s going to explode.
Limon’s use of enjambment is brilliant. In “Unbearable,” she continues to avoid the topic of deaths and accidents, which seems to fascinate her grandmother:
…Over the kitchen
table I told her to stop it. She didn’t
understand why it was making me upset.
It’s one of the ways she builds suspense. She draws you in, slowly, leaves you walking on tiptoes, trying to peek beyond the bend ahead—tricks you into wrong turns, and pulls you back on track.
He thinks the moon is too
important tonight, too full
of itself, it likes to think
it can walk on water…
There’s actually not so much that can startle us these days, as noted in the opening lines of “Flood Coming:” “The pulled-apart world scatters / its bad news like a brush fire, / the ink bleeds out the day’s undoing / and here we are again: alive.” The writer’s application of contrasts, especially in the context of size and stature, and the juxtaposition with impact is extensive through the book, used to create tension between intimacy and the scale of existence. Her astonishment is drawn from the mundane, and the absurd—the ignored. The little prayers that turn massive tides. The tiny flames in the river’s ripples.
Ada Limon’s use of smallness is poetics of attention and survival, a protest against erasure. She emphasizes the significance of little things in a big universe—the interconnectivity of elements and the importance of interactions. There’s a wittiness to how the author balances beauty and devastation. She uses humour as a tool to dilute grief, without undermining its essence. A perfect example is the poem, “At the Hardware Store,” where a business is struggling to respond to changes, in demands or lack of patronage, grasping at straws of survival. A crookedly scratched word on the store’s sign reflects the true state of the business—hardly hardware!
Small glass ashtrays full of
small glass candy–not even
an ashtray’s an ashtray anymore
And I return to memory, as the writer returns often, this time, a smile preserved in a photograph, a father’s mustache lush on the skin of nostalgia, opening up an ache in time, and a longing to bridge distance. And again, the odd details: “I miss how he points / to his apple trees. (“My Father’s Mustache”). The poet reminisces about romantic experiences with the power of hindsight in “Against Nostalgia,” pondering the outcome of rewriting the events. What would have been of the persona’s first garden if she hadn’t climbed on that motorcycle? We are an iteration of mistakes, trunk stripped of branches and leaves, yet every experience is a cycle of failing and healing.
In one of her interviews, Limon suggests that humans are merely animals who wear clothes—a provocation that unsettles the presumed hierarchy between the human and the natural world. This claim echoes and unsettles Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s argument about the animalization of Blackened existence. Jackson, in her book Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, argues that the conflation of Blackness with animality has historically been a site of violence, a means of denying ontological stability to the Black subject. This discovery, through Jackson’s work, opens up a duality of relationship the human self has with animality. However, in Limon’s formulation, the claim that “humans are animals” does not descend into bestiality. The text reclaims that relationship, arguing that it is possible for humans to have a relationship with animals without the ontologized plasticity that Western thinkers have attached to black people. Limon gestures toward a radical intimacy with animals, and she refuses to situate the human as sovereign.
Startlement: New and Selected Poems reminds me of the universality of ecopoetics. Her works, particularly “Sanctuary” and “My Father’s Mustache,” re-echo “eye of the world,” a phrase resonant with Niyi Osundare, one of the world’s most critical poets with ecological interests. In the site of these poems, perception is reciprocal, and the world looks back, perhaps remembering something lush and much greener than the present day. In “Strange Refuge,” a star returns the gaze; in “How to Measure Distance,” a marble statue’s leg bears a vein; in “The Origin Revisited,” a “sinless creek bed” embodies purity without transcendence. Through such images, the poet dissolves boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, between matter and spirit. Her diction, precise yet luminous, makes vitality palpable—each noun seems to inhale, each verb to shimmer. In her universe, everything breathes: the landscapes, the silences, even language itself, which she renders as a living organism, pulsing with the quiet energy of creation.
For this poem, everything is symbolic. “live, live I say, / quietly to the jar, / which isn’t a jar but my own pounding invocation.” Yet everything remains simply what they are—or not. Swallow has “two wholly different meanings.” Religion is like a chorus, something you return to over and over, like an echo, for the sheer pleasure of it. Root is something humans can’t escape—metaphorically, a tree must survive rooted to a spot, without the option of running. Still, Ada feels inadequate with language:
Once, I thought
if I knew all the words
I would say the right thing
in the right way,
instead language becomes
more brutish…
This book sets Ada Limon’s literary growth up for analysis. While retaining her thematic fascination, her works have grown shorter in length and have lost the restlessness of her earlier verses. The language is sharper, and the poems come with fresh urgency, perhaps replacing the characteristic vulnerability and humour.
The length of this poetry collection makes it feel cyclic rather than cumulative. The transition between the sections feels abrupt and fractured rather than integrated. Yet, the book shows range and balances risk and authority—it is honest and artistic. Startlement is both reflective and prospective, with grief, wonder, and ridiculous joy in abundance—to be startled is to be awakened!
“In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” arrives as a quiet meditation on our dual longing—for the heavens above and for the hidden depths of our own touchable world. Commissioned to accompany NASA’s Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter’s moon, the poem functions as a paradox of perspective: even as it gestures outward to the vast, icy expanse of space, it calls attention to the enigmas that remain unresolved within and beneath us. The poem, at its core, performs a restraint that adds a level of elegance, delivered in diction deliberately unadorned, eschewing scientific precision for the clarity of wonder. In doing so, it refuses the language of empiricism in favor of one steeped in awe and spiritual inquiry.
We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds
The poem positions curiosity itself as sacred—a force that links the distant orbit of Europa with the mysterious pulse of the Earth’s own seas and shadows. In avoiding explanation, the poem performs its title: an invitation to praise mystery, not to dispel it.
What makes the work, this poem, these collected poems, compelling is the bridge they build between the cosmic and the terrestrial, transforming the scientific act of exploration into an act of reverence. Perhaps Limon is fully arriving at her own ecological precision, with this book, declaring herself as the poet of the known world.
