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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley.

When Ada Limon became the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States in 2022,

she imagined her role would be to bring poetry to the people.

What she found instead was that poetry was already everywhere,

in waiting rooms, on subway cars, and secret journals.

People just didn't call themselves poets.

It's that kind of intimacy, poetry as a quiet, essential part of daily life,

that defines Limon's own work.

Her new collection, startlement, new and selected poems, spans nearly 20 years of writing,

bringing together poems from six earlier books alongside new works that grapple with living in this moment,

the climate crisis, the erosion of privacy, and the exhaustion

of being constantly on display. Her previous collections include The Carrying, which won the National

Book Critics Circle Award, and Bright Dead Things, a finalist for the National Book Award.

She's also a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named one of Time

Magazine's Women of the Year and recently completed a three-year tenure as Poet Laureate.

Ada Limon, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure.

Ada, you know that word startlement, the name of your book, that's also a poem in the book,

it's not a word we use anymore.

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