“… I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.”
— — Ada Limón, from “Calling Things What They Are,” The Hurting Kind
This is my knee, since she touches me there. This is my throat, as defined by her reaching. I am touched—I am.
— Natalie Diaz, from “isn’t the air also a body, moving?” to Ada Limón, published in The New Yorker
From January through September of 2017, the poets Natalie Diaz and Ada Limón conducted an inspired and collaborative correspondence. The resulting poem-letters reveal, as most missives do, their writers’ lives, but also a time and a place. Read (and listen to) their correspondence here.
This is my knee, since she touches me there. This is my throat, as defined by her reaching. I am touched—I am.
— Natalie Diaz, from “isn’t the air also a body, moving?” to Ada Limón, published in The New Yorker
From January through September of 2017, the poets Natalie Diaz and Ada Limón conducted an inspired and collaborative correspondence. The resulting poem-letters reveal, as most missives do, their writers’ lives, but also a time and a place. Read (and listen to) their correspondence here.
