Ada Limón. lucky wreck. Autumn House Press, 2006.

For me, it’s all about intimacy, voice, the speaker and the spoken to. Ada Limón establishes such intimacy with a simple pronoun in this book’s first poem, “First Lunch with Relative Stranger Mister You.”

We solved the problem of the wind

                                            with an orange.

Now we’ve got the problem

                                          of the orange.

This “we” reaches out to the reader and yet retains its mystery. The logic is dreamlike rather than waking. This is jazz improvisation—the harmonic structure of a familiar song under a unique melody. Also pleasantly mysterious—and yet inviting, not alienating, not opaque—is the poet’s play with syntax and punctuation:

In Albuquerque yes is hard/easy/look

                                           a roadrunner!

I can’t help hearing Frank O’Hara, and that is music to my ears.

In this debut collection, the 2005 winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize, judged by Jean Valentine, Limón convinces us of poetry’s necessity, its inevitability, her own inability to make any sense of experience, reality, the world without it. And yet she resists the burden of poetry, as we resist the burden of waking, of dreaming, of traveling on precipitous mountain roads.

I am obviously unsure of the usefulness

of inevitable things. Even the word

inevitable is awkward and hard to spell.

Like the girl in “The Echo Sounder,” the poet enters the world “with a language restricted/ by its own inability to name things/ as she sees them.” When God doesn’t answer her questions, the girl makes up her own answers, but the answers become meaningless through repetition, like animal sounds, until “she takes comfort/ in her animal-ness” and “wants to go on”

being an animal, not something that represents

something else, but the original object, the

thing before it was named, the fish before she

knew it was a fish, when it was just another

lost thing, individual and shadowy, working

its way toward its own end.

This conflict marks the entire book—between a yearning for an existence before language, and an affirmation of language as the key to consciousness and meaning, as in “Farmer’s Almanac,” where language becomes defiance, as does our very identity:

If I meet you again, let’s make inappropriate sounds

all over town and by inappropriate I mean the sounds

of our names.

At the center of the book is a short sequence, “Spring, 1989,” about the infamous murder spree of Ramón Salcido, a forklift operator who shot his wife, slit the throats of his three daughters, and fatally stabbed his mother-in-law and her two daughters, before going to the vineyard where he worked and killing his supervisor, whom he suspected of having an affair with his wife. The gruesome events took place in Limón’s native Sonoma, California, when the poet was a middle schooler. The sequence is dedicated to Carmina, the 3 year old middle child who survived her father’s assault. “To be in a small town is to repeat the same/ experiences again every day,” Limón writes:

                                         Sixteen years later,

the same bright reflection of traffic underneath

the new yellow of spring heat, the cars going both

up the mountain, and down, everyone looking over

their shoulder for a dark enemy and one girl,

over and over, returning to us—in a familiar shape,

a good object, a hope in the weeds.

Carmina, found alive in a dumpster in Santa Rosa with her dead sisters, is like the “lucky wreck” of the book’s title, the wreck that appears in the poem “All Kinds of Shipwrecks,” of which Limón asks, “What would I rather be:// the diver, or O lucky wreck to have been found?” Throughout the book, Limón explores questions of identity—the extent to which we choose our identity or our identity chooses us, and what is the role of poetry in all of this.

The highlight of the book is the concluding sequence, “Thirteen Feral Cats,” in which the inevitability of language and poetry is affirmed even as their ultimate efficacy is questioned.

I have refused to remain silent and yet

still remain

very small.

In this sequence, Limón is clearly engaging with modernist and postmodernist poetics. Her feral cats are unmistakably reminiscent of Stevens’ blackbirds, and in her room, as in Eliot’s, “the women do come and go.” Limón experiments delightfully with the resources of grammar and prosody. Long lines, short lines, long runs of monostichic stanzas, the sudden intrusion of a numbered list or a list marked by anaphora à la Whitman.

For better or worse, I tend to think about how new poets do or do not partially align with the major movements of twentieth-century poetry, and I can’t help discerning something Deep Imagistic about Limón’s lucky wreck, invoking as it does specific images throughout the text—the orange, the wind, rocks, cliffs, bees, spiders, tables, floors, roads, houses; images that are concrete, not abstract, and that advance a narrative that remains highly lyrical. There is something Deep Imagistic too, I think, about Limón’s central and driving concerns with inevitability and identity, since, of all the major twentieth-century movements in poetry, Deep Image is the one that seems most obsessed with the necessity of poetry to meaning and of meaning to poetry. Paradoxically, perhaps, by stripping poetry down to the most essential of images, the poet erects the greatest edifice of meaning, and challenges both poetry and meaning to exist independently of the other, joyfully failing in this impossible project, this lucky wreck.

—Michael Broder