Ada Limón
Beauty · Love
Ada Limón
A poet whose work brings the body, affection and the more-than-human world into close conversation.
Born 1976 · 24th U.S. Poet Laureate, 2022–2025 · American poet
Their literary world
Ada Limón explores the body, emotional life, and the natural world together. Her poems move between intimate experience and the larger rhythms of animals, landscapes, weather, and seasons, making room for grief, desire, illness, belonging, and uncertainty.
Difficulty and beauty coexist in her work. The living world does not necessarily resolve suffering, but can offer companionship and perspective. Limón’s poems make attention to other forms of life a contemporary way of thinking about love beyond the self.
Featured reading · Flute & Forge reading companion
The Carrying
A companion to Limón’s poem about carrying grief and daily life together, while the body keeps reaching toward the living world.
Limón’s title holds two meanings together: what we carry emotionally and what the body carries through daily life. The poem’s attention to physical experience lets grief coexist with movement, care and the living world. Read the authorized text at Poets.org, where the lines can speak in their own cadence.
The companion is editorial; the Academy of American Poets hosts the authorized poem.
Read the poem at Poets.orgA passage
“The sky’s white with November’s teeth,”The Carrying · from The Carrying (2018)
A way into the passage
Limón makes a late-autumn landscape feel bodily and emotionally charged. In the poem, the scene around a horse and a wintering field opens into reflections on the speaker’s own body, vulnerability, and possibility.
Essential works
Poetry collection · 2018
The Carrying
A collection on grief, the body, relationships, fertility, and the resilience of ordinary life.
Poetry collection · 2022
The Hurting Kind
Poems attentive to connection, memory, vulnerability, and the lives of humans and other creatures.
Poetry collection · 2025
Startlement: New and Selected Poems
A new and selected collection spanning Limón’s poems of wonder, kinship, and the living world.
A question worth exploring
Can attention to the natural world help us stay open to life when circumstances are difficult?
A question to carry with you
What can an ordinary creature teach our attention?
An editorial introduction by Flute & Forge Studio.