Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertilityWhat if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal. And still Limn shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. Fine then, / Ill take it, she writes. Ill take it all.

InBright Dead Things, Limn showed us a heart giant with power, heavy with bloodthe huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / its going to come in first. In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full displayeven asThe Carryingcontinues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.