QS36501006577Startlement: New and Selected Poems

An essential collection spanning nearly twenty years of emphatic, fearlessly original poetry from one of America’s most celebrated living writers.

Drawing from six previously published books–including widely acclaimed collectionsThe Hurting Kind,The Carrying, andBright Dead Things–as well as vibrant new work,Startlementexalts the mysterious. With a tender curiosity, Ada Limn wades into potent unknowns–the strangeness of our brief human lives, the ever-changing nature of the universe–and emerges each time with new revelations about our place in the world.

Both a lush overview of her work and a powerful narrative of a poet’s life, this curation embodies Limn’s capacity for “deep attention,” her “power to open us up to the wonder and awe that the world still inspires” (The New York Times). From the chaos of youthful desire, to the waxing of love and loss, to the precarity of our environment, to the stars and beyond, Limn’s poetry bears witness to the arc of all we know with patient lyricism and humble wonder.

Ada Limn is the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate as well the author of The Hurting Kind and five other collections of poems. These include, most recently, The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics CircleAward and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and BrightDead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, theNational Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limn is arecipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in the NewYorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review,among others. She is the former host of American Public Media’s weekday poetrypodcast The Slowdown. Born and raised in California, she now livesin Lexington, Kentucky.

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions (September 30, 2025)
• Language: English
• Hardcover: 232pages
• ISBN-13: 9781639550517
• Item Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
• BISAC Categories: Poetry