The Morris Book Shop is hosts Ada Limón as she signs her new poetry collection, “Bright Dead Things” on September 5 at 5 pm.

“About the book:
Bright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately “disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.”

A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact—tracing in intimate detail the various ways the speaker’s sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.

Praise for “Bright Dead Things:”

“In Ada Limon’s Bright Dead Things, there’s a fierce jazz and sass (“this life is a fist / of fast wishes caught by nothing, / but the fishhook of tomorrow’s tug.”) and there’s sadness—a grappling with death and loss that forces the imagination to a deep response. The radio in her new, rural home warns “stay safe and seek shelter” and yet the heart seeks love, risk, and strangeness—and finds it everywhere.”—Gregory Orr

“Ada Limón doesn’t write as if she needs us. She writes as if she wants us. Her words reveal, coax, pull, see us. In Bright Dead Things we read desire, ache, what human beings rarely have the heart or audacity to speak of alone—without the help of a poet with the most generous of eyes.”—Nikky Finney

About the author:
Ada Limón is the author of four poetry collections. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, and Guernica. She lives in Kentucky and California.”