A Conversation With Ada Limón, in Six Poems
About this episode
As a respite from politics, Klein spends an hour with poet Ada Limón, structured around six poems she reads aloud. Limón, host of the podcast 'The Slowdown' and author of the new collection 'The Hurting Kind,' discusses how poetry forces a slower pace of attention — Mary Oliver's notion of attention as devotion — against the speed of news and social media. The conversation moves through a poem for her mother about childhood scoliosis, the viral 'Raincoat' about an encounter with an unhoused man, 'Foaling Season,' in which watching mares and foals crystallizes the line 'I will never be a mother,' and poems about leaving New York for Kentucky after 12 years. Limón reflects on her deliberately de-centered new book, her anxiety (absent when she writes), her daily meditation practice, and how poetry holds both grief and wonder.