Ada Limón’s The Carrying Featured at PBS NewsHour

At PBS NewsHour, learn more about Ada Limón’s book The Carrying, very recently published by Milkweed Editions. The collection, as Jennifer Hijazi reports, "is about the contradictory joys and burdens we all carry." From there: 

“It could be the weight of history, it can be the weight of the current moment, it can also be joy and love,” Limón said. “I wanted to point to the human capacity to carry many things at once.”

Limón wasn’t expecting her fifth book to be so deeply personal — she says it’s her “most autobiographical work” — but as the poems flowed, she realized she was working through her own issues, like her struggles with fertility.

The societal connection between womanhood, motherhood and power is at the core of her work, which explores what she says is a “privilege” bestowed upon those with the ability to have children. To her, “even the word ‘infertile’ implies a powerlessness.”

In the poem “Maybe I’ll Be Another Kind of Mother,” Limón reexamines this privilege and owns “the idea of what is it like to be child-free and … [to] see that as another, freer future, as opposed to something that was lesser to the preferred state of womanhood.”

Read more at NewsHour.