Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón

Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The collection was Ada Limón's fourth book of poems and brought her to wide national attention before she was named U.S. Poet Laureate.

The collection explores grief, reinvention, and identity, particularly Limón's relocation from New York City to rural Kentucky and the death of her stepmother. Its poems move between the domestic and the natural world with direct, accessible language, as in the frequently anthologized piece "How to Triumph Like a Girl."

Bright Dead Things was published in 2015 by Milkweed Editions, a nonprofit independent literary press based in Minneapolis. The same press also published Limón's subsequent collection, The Carrying, in 2018.

Bright Dead Things is widely regarded as the collection that established Limón as a major American poet and is frequently recommended as an entry point to her work. Its plain-spoken style and emotionally direct poems are characteristic of the voice that later earned her the U.S. Poet Laureate appointment.