Best Of: How America's Poet Laureate Sees Our World

Published: Dec. 30, 2022, 10 a.m.

b'\\u200b\\u200b\\u201cOne of the biggest things about poetry is that it holds all of humanity,\\u201d the poet Ada Lim\\xf3n tells me. \\u201cIt holds the huge and enormous and tumbling sphere of human emotions.\\u201d\\n\\nAt the end of a turbulent year, we thought revisiting this May 2022 conversation with Lim\\xf3n would be fitting. Just months after our conversation, Lim\\xf3n was named U.S. poet laureate.\\n\\nLim\\xf3n\\u2019s work is a salve for all that the world faces: her books of poetry are filled with meditations on grief and infertility, as well as striking moments of insight about friendship, lust and our fellowship with animals. Her most recent book, \\u201cThe Hurting Kind,\\u201d explores what it means to share the planet with nonhuman beings like birds and trees. Lim\\xf3n describes the marvels of Kentucky\\u2019s rural landscape and the dusky beauty of a New York City bar with equal care. Her writing is highly acclaimed by fellow poets and also delightfully accessible to those who have never before picked up a book of poetry.\\n\\nLim\\xf3n is a lively reader of her own poetry, so to structure this conversation, I asked her to read a varied selection of her work. We use those readings to discuss what poetry gives us that the news doesn\\u2019t, the importance of slowing down in a world that demands speed, how the grief of infertility differs from that of losing a loved one, how to be \\u201cin community\\u201d with ancestors and animals in lonely times, why Lim\\xf3n loves \\u201cchatty\\u201d and humorous poems as much as serious ones, why we often have our best thoughts in cars and on planes, how Instagram and Twitter affect our relationship to the world, why Lim\\xf3n meditates every day, how our relationship to excitement changes as we age and more.\\n\\nBook Recommendations:\\n\\nStones by Kevin Young\\n\\nFrank: Sonnets by Diane Seuss\\n\\nPostcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz\\n\\nThoughts? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Guest suggestions? Fill out this form.\\n\\nYou can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of \\u201cThe Ezra Klein Show\\u201d at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.\\n\\n\\u201cThe Ezra Klein Show\\u201d is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rog\\xe9 Karma; fact-checking by Haylee Millikan; original music by Isaac Jones and Jeff Geld; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski, Rebecca Elise Foote and Jahan Ramazani.'