Startlement: New and Selected Poems by Ada Limón. Milkweed Editions. 2025.
Reviewed by Hugh Blanton
Ada Limón’s latest collection, Startlement, isn’t really a new book; it’s a collection of poems culled from her previous six books going back to 2006, with a chapbook of twenty-one new poems tacked on at the end. As if this two-term United States poet laureate couldn’t be bothered to come up with a book-length collection since her last one, The Hurting Kind, appeared in 2022 – Limón’s publisher likely wanted something new to hit shelves before that special laureate shine wore off, and this cobbled-together book is the result. Patricia Smith’s latest collection, 2025’s The Intentions of Thunder, offered a similar gathering of past books, and the National Book Foundation loved it so much they bestowed their poetry award on it (no explanation as to how they’d overlooked all the individual books up to that point). Unlike Smith, however, Limón lacks the boon of a unique style, so much so that you’d never read one of her poems and think – apropos of the diction, the line breaks, the syntax, the tone – “I’m in an Ada Limón poem.”
Most of the poems in Startlement were written in free verse, with the occasional excursion into prose poetry, a tendency that might have been for the best, considering her early flirtation with the sonnet form, evident in her first book Lucky Wreck. Second-hand embarrassment only gets us part of the way: it’s as though Limón attempted to channel her inner Emily Dickinson, but the poems’ half-hearted, single-syllable end rhymes – “I watch as the spider comes close like a spy, / Unsure if I am jealous of the web or the fly” – are so uninspired they can’t help falling flat. And it gets worse: “Let’s test the waters, drop the anchor, watch it sink / Into the waves the way you drop yourself in drink.” It’s fortunate that Limón gave up on formal rhyming poetry after that first book.
Though she managed to strengthen her grasp of other devices (metaphor, figurative language) in subsequent books, other early poems are often just as shockingly bad. Many read as though they were composed by exploding a dictionary, the lines (and sometimes the words within the lines) so logically unrelated as to give the most convoluted of John Ashbery’s poems a run for their money. It’s possible that these poems represent the attempt to adopt a suitably artistic posture of opacity – a rite of passage for many a poet, however misguided – but it’s more likely she was simply in a mad dash to finish the thing and call it a poem. After all, how does one make sense of lines like these?
I get attached to rocks.
At the tone the time will be: Let's never die!
We've just met, should we move to Ensenada?
Or should I just borrow a pen?
Plenty of place names crop up in the course of Limón’s poems, tracing a line from the above-mentioned Ensenada (Mexico, from which her father’s family hails) through Sonoma (California, where she was born and raised) to her home since 2011 (the state of Kentucky). In her 2015 book, Bright Dead Things, we find the transplanted poet contemplating a novel-in-progress, and the irony would be inescapable if “poet of clumsily plain lines” weren’t more or less the description of many a commercial novelist.
Limón has never been all that interested in meter, but her poetry does become gradually more metrical with time, as in the opening lines to “During the Impossible Age of Everyone”: “There are so many people who’ve come before us, / arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo” (although the lines would have been better if the “who have” had not been contracted). Other habits, however, have a tendency for annihilating the best of her positive qualities. Some of her poems, for instance, drift into a claustrophobic self-regard:
I haven't given up on trying to live a good life,
a really good one even, sitting in the kitchen
in Kentucky, imagining how agreeable I'll be –
the advance of fulfillment, and of desire –
all these needs met, then unmet again.
In “State Bird,” Limón confesses she never wanted to live in Kentucky: “not with the million- / dollar racehorses, not the tightly wound / round hay bales.” Like poet/novelist Ocean Vuong, she often feels the need to make the world fall in love with her sadness: “Six horses died in a tractor-trailer fire. / There. That’s the hard part.” I tried to find the incident she was referring to here and found so many incidents of six horses being killed in tractor-trailer fires I couldn’t be sure exactly which one she was writing about.
With non-formal, prosey poets like Limón, it’s the topics they write about, rather than the ways they say it, that garner the most attention. She’s correctly regarded as an “accessible” poet; that quality is, in fact, what caught the attention of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden when she selected Limón as United States poet laureate in 2022: “her accessible, engaging verse bridges divides, grounds readers in shared human experiences, and fosters community connection through the power of wonder and empathy.” All would be well with such an assessment if the evidence of her own poems didn’t negate the sentiment almost immediately. In her poem, “The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual,” Limón responds to a time when she was asked to speak to an organization that was applying for a grant: “When you come, please bring your brown-/ ness so we can be sure to please // the funders.” A few verses later: “Will you tell us the stories that make / us uncomfortable, but not complicit?” No mention of whether or not the organization got their grant, or even the organization’s name. It would be easy to imagine their embarrassment, though, after recognizing themselves in the poem.
Yet the immaturity of the earlier poems falls away in her 2018 volume, The Carrying. No longer overeager, she strikes a simpler, more self-assured style with lines like “A surge of relief comes like a check in the mail.” It’s difficult for the poet intent on penning appreciative lines about his or her mother to avoid cliché, but Limón manages to sound a note of originality in a poem titled “The Raincoat”: “My god, / I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her / raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel / that I never got wet.” It’s in this same span of pages that we also encounter poems that remember the mentor who helped her understand what makes a good poem good – namely by learning what makes a bad poem bad. In “The Magnificent Frigatebird,” revelation arrives when her mentor instructs her: “You can’t start a poem with a man looking / out a window. Too many men looking out a window.” Undoubtedly the mentor had noticed the insipidness of much of her early work!
Limón’s flitting about from topic to topic within a given poem is polarizing; it’s either irritating or delightful (irritating in the earlier poems, delightful in the later). In the middle of a poem about her move from New York to Kentucky we find this verse shoehorned in:
Somewhere I had heard that, after noting the lack
of water pressure in an old hotel in Los Angeles,
they found a woman's body at the bottom
of the cistern.
This isn’t the product of a macabre imagination. In 2013 Canadian tourist Elisa Lam had been reported missing by her parents – she had last been seen at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles – only for her corpse to be discovered clogging the water tank on the hotel roof. Limón closes out the poem with fitting grimness:
After that, when the water would act weird,
spurt, or gurgle, I’d imagine a body, a woman, a me
just years ago, freely single, happily unaccounted for,
at the lowest curve of the water tower.
Yes, and over and over,
I’d press her limbs down with a long pole
until she was still.
The beginning of the poem detailed her dislike for having moved to Kentucky. This ending implies she would have gone to great lengths to prevent it, given the chance to do it all over.
Hugh Blanton’s latest book is The Pudneys. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.