AGAINST BREAKING On the power of poetry

In praise of poetry. In April 2025, as her closing lecture as the 24th poet laureate of the United States, Limón, a MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, celebrates the power of poetry to inspire, illuminate, and transform. "When clarity is hard to come by," she writes, "when language has morphed into a tool for confusion, I put my faith in poetry." Speaking to her listeners at the Library of Congress, she invokes the work of poets who have given her solace and hope, among them William Butler Yeats, Lucille Clifton, Robert Hass, Jean Valentine, Langston Hughes, and Emily Dickinson. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Adam Zagajewski's "Try to praise the mutilated world" comforted her, she attests, "when all the rhetoric of war and nationalism and violence was blotting out the sun." Often, she has turned to Mary Oliver for wise counsel: "I don't know exactly what a prayer is. / I do know how to pay attention." Poetry can lift a person outside of oneself, creating a sense of belonging to a community and to the world, and also leads deeply within oneself. "Poetry can be our lens for discovering how we can find our own worth," Limón writes, "the individual gift we can offer." Limón's signature effort as poet laureate has been the You Are Here project, which places poetry in National Parks. A list of seven beneficiaries of the project is appended in an afterword. Bringing poetry into public spaces reflects Limon's ardent belief that poetry "is meant to be free, it's meant to be given, it's meant to travel one poem at a time, like pollen from a tree floating through the air to make more trees." A graceful, moving tribute, and a gift to readers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.