The poems in Lucky Wreck trace the excitement of plans and the necessary swerving detours we must take when those plans fail. Looking to shipwrecks on the television, road trips ending in traffic accidents, and homes that become sites of infestation, Ada Limón finds threads of hope amid an array of small tragedies and significant setbacks. Open, honest, and grounded, the poems in this collection seek answers to familiar questions and teach us ways to cope with the pain of many losses with earnestness and humor. Through the wrecks, these poems continue to offer assurance. This darkness is not the scary one,
it’s the one before the sun comes up,
the one you can still breathe in.
Celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Limón’s award-winning debut, this edition includes a new introduction by the poet that reflects on the book and on how her writing practice has developed over time.
Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was named one of the top five poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency MFA program and the online and summer programs for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer in Lexington, Kentucky.
Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was named one of the top five poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency MFA program and the online and summer programs for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer in Lexington, Kentucky.
“From the first lines of
Lucky Wreck, I was drawn in by this smart, jaunty, musing, quirky voice, and as I read the whole book I felt more and more respect for Ada Limón’s risky, haunting, wonderfully unexpected work. Like many of the best writers, she is funny and serious at the same time, the depths and heights are one: lucky wreck!”
— Jean Valentine, author of Shirt in Heaven (praise for the first edition)
“Ada’s new book has a smart clip of anger to some of the poems, edgy parameters of disappointment to others, lots of personal relationship narratives, conflicts and emotional realizations; decisions, choices, changes, hopes and sadness, a type of survival poetry searching the world, getting into a deeper knowledge of people, and as the searchlight strobes out from the lighthouse through the fog and mist to lost travelers and explorers, structure changes toward an inventive orthodoxy of the heart’s stormy reign. . . . .bravo.”
— Jimmy Santiago Baca, author of When I Walk Through That Door, I Am (praise for the first edition)
