The Poetry of Ada Limón Literary Elements

Limón almost exclusively writes from a first-person perspective that is highly reflective of her own thoughts and feelings. She has acknowledged in interviews that her writing is highly autobiographical.

Primarily free-verse with no set rhyme. "Instructions on Not Giving Up" loosely follows a sonnet form in its number of lines and rhetorical structure, but not in meter or rhyme.

Limón frequently uses one-off metaphors and similes to assign emotional depth and complexity to images of nature or her surroundings. For example, "I am a hearth of spiders" ("Dead Stars") compares the speaker to a spider nest, evoking the restlessness of her mind. "Instructions on Not Giving Up" has many comparisons of flowers to candy and cheap things, dismissing them as sweet but temporary, but instead compares the new leaves to skin or a human fist, a stronger and more enduring image.

Limón uses the sonic quality of language—alliteration, assonance, and consonance—more in some poems than others, primarily when she is at her most free-associative and figurative with her language ("The End of Poetry," "The Leash") rather than her more conversational tone ("Wife," "How to Triumph Like a Girl"). This aspect especially stands out in lines such as "birthing of bombs of forks and fear" (the dramatic opening to "The Leash"), or "the stoic farmer and faith and our father" from "The End of Poetry."

Of the poems we've analyzed, "The End of Poetry" is by far Limón's most ironic, taking a self-referential approach to critiquing the genre of poetry. It's an ironic task for a poem, and highlights art's inability to ever truly replace real human contact. Other poems include moments of irony like the trash bins of "Dead Stars" being romantic, or the bitter satire of the Judy Brady manifesto quote in "Wife."

Confessional, emotionally-focused contemporary free verse poetry

Often in or around Limón's home in Kentucky: on sidewalks, at home, among animals, or in the speaker's own thoughts

Often the tone moves through despair and emotional turmoil to an ending that is more hopeful, inspiring, or determined. "How to Triumph Like a Girl" is an outlier for having a boastful, triumphant tone all the way through.

The speaker is consistently the protagonist, and there is rarely a clear "antagonist" other than the presence of tragedy, violence, and despair in the world

Usually Limón's poems focus on internal conflict of emotion, the speaker's struggle to overcome her own fears and handle the tragedies of the world

Many of Limón's poems build continually until a concise, powerful climax in or around the final line(s). These endings usually include a call to action, as in "The End of Poetry" or "Instructions on Not Giving Up," or an expression of a pure and important emotion, as in "Wife" or "How to Triumph Like a Girl."

Often, Limón's poems include a tonal shift partway through the poem, usually from a darker tone to a more hopeful tone. This shift is often foreshadowed or preceded by hints: "unleashed" in line 2 of "The Leash" foreshadows the usage of the titular image later on; the speaker's line of dialogue to the horses in "How to Triumph Like a Girl" hints at the address to the reader later on.

Understatement is not a prominent feature of Limón's work, but appears occasionally in lines such as "we are not unspectacular things" from "Dead Stars," signifying the speaker's struggle in shifting away from small, confined thinking to a bigger, more ambitious frame of mind.

Allusions are rare in Limón's work, given that it is usually highly personal. An exception is the quote in "Wife," from Judy Brady's 1971 feminist satire "I Want a Wife," which connects Limón's poem to a longer lineage of feminist writers. Another is "The End of Poetry," which uses lines from the patriotic song "America (My Country, 'Tis of Thee)" and the Christian words of the Lord's Prayer.

These are uncommon poetic devices for Limón, but appear primarily in descriptions of noteworthy body parts (whether her own or those of plants / animals) such as "the delicate skin of my body" in "Triumph" or "synapses and flesh" in "Dead Stars," both referring to human bodies as a whole.

Nature, plants, and animals are regularly personified in Limón's work: horses signify feminist power; spring trees are described as holding out a hand to life's hardships and saying "I'll take it all." Winter is personified repeatedly, in "Dead Stars" (as a pressuring hand at our backs), "The Leash" (as a dying woman), and "Instructions on Not Giving Up" (as an abuser or bringer of tragedy).

Like understatement, hyperbole is rare as Limón regularly describes things exactly as they are. But it appears at the extreme points of the speaker's emotional variations: "she who tears a hole in the earth" for grief in "Wife," for example, or the female horse heart "that thinks, no, it knows" it will win. Hyperbole accentuates the intensity of these emotional lows and highs.

Rare in Limón's work. An exception is "woosh" in "Wife" to describe the titular word's light, airy sound.