In celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month, I wanted to look at some works by Ada Limón, the current Poet Laureate of the United States and the first Latina to hold the position (who also happens to be coming to CWRU next spring to present at an English Colloquium). When looking through Limón’s poems, three particularly gripped me: “Give Me This”, “Sparrow, Sparrow, What Did You Say?”, and “The News She Does Not Give Him (Everyone is Killing Us)”.

“Give Me This” focuses primarily on Limón’s account of a groundhog eating tomatoes outside her house. This account is interrupted temporarily, with the speaker recollecting “A stranger writes to request my thoughts on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth, as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled spikes used in warfare and fencing”. Thus the observation of the groundhog is a means of escapism, a way to temporarily avoid the “important” questions of life. There’s a great sense of relatability; I find, from time to time, that I wish I could escape the pressures and complications of my life, if only for a moment, and adopt what I perceive as the simpler life of some animal I’ve observed.

I find myself drawn to “Sparrow, Sparrow, What Did You Say?” for similar reasons I find “Give Me This” so gripping. “Sparrow” likewise focuses on an ordinary, seemingly minute, occurrence of nature which the speaker is directly observing. “Sparrow” also intertwines the observation of nature with heavy personal reflection. The speaker’s focus on a sparrow transitions to a contemplation on whether or not to have a kid. Given the increase of sentiments along the lines of “Women who choose not to have children are selfish” I have seen, primarily online, as of late, I find the reflection upon the decision not to have children in this poem particularly engaging. The speaker questions, “Would I selfishly demand this day back, a full untethered day trying to figure out what bird was calling to me and why”; it’s a very real concern, one that I find myself fixated on every time I revisit this poem.

“The News She Does Not Give Him”, when it comes to subject matter, is a stark departure from the previously discussed poems. The poem depicts a real-life shooting at a Kroger in Kentucky, and it is dedicated to the two victims of said shooting. This poem’s use of repetition had a great impact on me. “Casually” and “gunman” are used so much within the poem that I personally begin to lose sense of what they actually mean and can only see them as words on a page, similar to repeating a word so much verbally that you start to lose sense of what you’re actually saying. This loss of meaning, in tandem with the subject of the poem, leads to a very intense read. For me, there is this dissonance between the language, which almost has a droning quality to it, and what is being portrayed, a burst of senseless violence. Perhaps this can be a statement on how the sheer volume of mass shootings we experience in the United States makes us desensitized to violence, reflected through the language we use to depict these tragedies.

These three poems are linked below. I hope you will feel inclined to check them out.

“Give Me This”

“The New She Does Not Give Him”

“Sparrow, Sparrow, What Did You Say?”