“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
--Anne Carson, The Glass Essay
“In many ways the poems in The Carrying were answering the question, ‘Where
do I put all this?’” – Ada Limòn, interviewed by Carrie Fountain
“Where do I put it all down?” I asked this, much less succinctly, and probably less eloquently, after I saw Ada Limòn read from The Carrying more than a year ago now. It was the week after the book came out and she was reading in New York. I only happened to be in the city at the time because I had missed my bus home and was stranded, jittery and overcaffeinated, for an extra eight hours. In another week, I would be strapped to a gurney for the third time in my life and sedated while several pounds of titanium rods and screws were stripped from my spine and my body was hosed clean of the bacteria that had caused an old surgical scar to rupture and swell for the past several months. I tell you this not because I enjoy the telling of it, although there’s a part of me, perversely, that does, but because I don’t know how to talk about The Carrying without seeing my body in it, without my breath catching when Ada writes “and soon my crooked spine unspooled.” Unspooled, unspooled, unspooled, I repeated to myself on the late-night bus home, straining my eyes to read even after the flickering MegaBus lights winked out. Hadn’t I been praying for an unspooling my whole life? For this body to feel like something less than temporary?
Something I’ve always appreciated about Ada’s work, particularly in The Carrying, is her ability to speak with honesty without ever caving to cynicism. These poems are intimately, at times painfully, aware of how we are often only a hair’s breadth from disaster, “always hurtling our bodies toward / the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love.” When I heard Ada read this line aloud in a bookstore in Brooklyn to a hushed crowd that overflowed the seats, I wasn’t thinking about craft. Not about syntax, or diction. Not about the musicality of her lines or the way she sets up our expectations only to perfectly, fittingly thwart them. I wasn’t thinking about any of the things I should have been as a poet. I was trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, not to cry in a room full of strangers. What Ada’s poems capture so vividly is the impossibility of divorcing ourselves from our bodies, these little vessels that shape so much about how we experience the world. And there were many times over the years where I desperately wanted to sever myself from my body, to excise its messiness, its constant aching. The way that messiness, for so long, defined me.
My experience is not a particularly unique one—surgeons can perform thousands of spinal fusions a year, and despite being painful to recover from, they are considered somewhat routine surgeries—but when I had my first operation at eight years old, I didn’t yet have the language for what I was experiencing. I would search for it for years, struggling to explain that I felt robbed of something essential I couldn’t locate or name. I think a large part of it was the sense that I didn’t own my body or what happened to it, that other people could make decisions that would shape the way I lived and moved for years. Even now, I can’t sleep on my right side, long after I abandoned my childhood back braces in my parents’ garage (You should run over them, my dad joked when I first got my license, and I laughed, even though I considered it).
For most of my life, I saw my body as a temporary, mutinous container. It wasn’t me. It couldn’t be. I treated myself with a reckless lack of care for many years in part because of this division. I balk at discussing how my chronic pain influenced my mental health because it feels melodramatic or like I’m excusing self-destructive behavior as a biological imperative. Or even that I’m denying that my first instinct, often, is still to treat my body as a kind of collateral. Poetry, for a long time, felt like it existed outside of this tension. A place where I lived without the limits I resented my body for imposing on me. So when my poems, again and again, turned to the scalpel, to the scar, to the rip of bandages, I was furious. This thing was even invading my mind, my writing, the one thing I thought I owned and controlled completely. When I fretted and complained to a mentor, she laughed, not unkindly. Write towards the obsession, she said. What I didn’t know how to explain to her was that I didn’t want to. I wanted to shed the obsession, to escape it, and I secretly hoped that I could outwrite it.
In The Carrying, the speaker’s unspoken obsessions are a constant, absent presence in the poems. The subterranean and the suppressed surface in unexpected ways. In the matter-of-fact poems about the dreams of a drowning baby, in the roots, literal, familial, and metaphorical, that ground the collection and weave between each poem, in the shadow narrative of an impossible motherhood that haunts the poem’s white spaces and silences. Pain, too, surfaces unexpectedly. “It’s taken / a while for me to admit, I am in a raging battle / with my body,” the speaker in “Wonder Woman,” confesses. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that reading Ada’s poetry about pain was what finally gave me permission to write about my own. She shares in an interview with Carrie Fountain that though she had allowed herself to be emotionally vulnerable in poems before, she had shied away from exploring her chronic pain from vertigo and scoliosis, her struggle with infertility, and the mental and physical impact that had. She says: “I think, for me, it all comes down to permission and capacity. I’m giving myself permission to write the poems I want—as different as they all are—and I am focusing on the human capacity to hold within us so many different things at once.”
This quote echoes what she told me that night when I asked her about her poems. How was she able to write about the pain and the grief without letting it define her? Without fearing that it would become what defined her to others, the body’s fallibility asserting itself once again? My personhood already felt circumscribed by my experience of my own body. I didn’t want my poetry to be limited by it too. I can’t remember how I phrased my question, exactly, but I remember how kind and generous she was in her response. How when I told her I had scoliosis, too, that my six-year-old surgical scar had busted open that past spring, signaling the metal buried in my spine was infected and would have to be taken out, she looked at me with genuine empathy, not with pity or with the eager sympathy of someone who wants you to just stop talking about it. She told me she thought we expanded to hold what we needed to and that our poems, too, could expand in this way, could hold both the joy and the pain and the margins where the two messily spilled together. Perhaps that is not a very neat or academic conclusion, but it’s one I’ve clung to. The knowledge that I can write towards my own pain and discomfort without drowning in it, that the moments in my writing I fear are overly sentimental or too much: too womanly, too bodily, too self-indulgent, too contradictory, are often the moments that bear the most fruitful revisions when I abandon my assumptions and explore them without self-censoring. Permission and capacity—if there was only one lesson I could take away from this book, that would be it. If I’m honest, though, it wasn’t Ada or anyone else who gave me permission to write the poems I needed to write, the way I needed to write them, even if her words served as a catalyst. We each have to make that decision each time we look at a blank page, have to make it again and again, even when it scares the shit out of us, and it should scare the shit out of us. We have to put it down somewhere. Why not here?