Ada Limón: ‘Every Book Is a New Way of Looking at the World’

This is a free edition of I Have Notes, a newsletter featuring essays, conversations, and notes on writing. Previously in my craft conversation series: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Crystal Hana Kim and R. O. Kwon, Lydia Kiesling, Bryan Washington

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Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Bright Dead Things, a National Book Award finalist; and her latest, The Hurting Kind, published on May 10 by Milkweed Editions. She also hosts a podcast, The Slowdown, in which she shares work by fellow poets—a brief and perfect offering every weekday, and a must-listen for anyone who loves or wants to read more poetry. She is one of my all-time favorite writers, someone whose work I return to again and again for solace, inspiration, and truth (my copies of The Carrying and Bright Dead Things are now so dog-eared that I could never loan them out to anyone), and I was thrilled to get to chat with her earlier this month.

Limón told me that many of the poems in her new book, , came from a place of questioning “what it is to belong … to be a witness of the world, and be witnessed by it.” She offered glimpses into her writing process—the questions that animate her work, what it means to launch a poem