All Were Limones

All Were Limones

$19.00

By Luisa Caycedo-Kimura

All Were Limones is a powerful debut collection from a new voice in contemporary poetry. Spanning decades and continents, these intimate, fierce, and lyrical poems both disquiet and comfort as they interrogate memory, family, identity, and home. In “Black-Eyed Susans,” Caycedo-Kimura writes, “Maybe it’s best to start with nothing:/blank paper, quiet room.” She may start with nothing, but she creates an intricate, layered world from her experience of coming to a new country as a child, and the endless project of creating a self and one’s art in this strange new place.—Jennifer Franklin, author of If Some God Shakes Your House

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About Luisa Caycedo-Kimura

Luisa Caycedo-Kimura’s poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Rattle, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Her honors include a Connecticut Office of the Arts Emerging Recognition Award, a John K. Walsh Residency Fellowship at the Anderson Center, and an Adrienne Reiner Hochstadt Fellowship at Ragdale. 

Praise for All Were Limones

This collection is a balancing act along multiple planes with dramas that are simultaneously personal, national, and universal. The voice is one that both sings and scours, wades into toughness to get to vulnerability and then doubles back to double down—all while lifting music from language and beauty from rubble. I love the intimacy, fearlessness, invention, and witness of this work which delivers more than truth: it gives us grace and reckoning as well.—Jennifer Oakes, author of We Can’t Tell If the Constellations Love Us

Reading All Were Limones, a thrilling book of losses and celebrations, I thought of the saying that writing is always an act of mourning: what was. And the more vivid what is told or described, the more clear the past tense. Each single, ordinary word—“limones” or “pimientas”—involves presence and absence. In Luisa Caycedo-Kimura’s vivid, lyrical poems, the telling of loss is a form of celebration.—Robert Pinsky, author of At the Founding Hospital

“Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry,” writes Muriel Rukeyser. The harsh, glorious, painful, beautiful breaths of experience are, literally, the inspiration for Luisa Caycedo-Kimura’s brilliant All Were Limones. A kind of memory map, All Were Limones asks important questions about family, trauma, migration and recollection. Her poems take us from Colombia to New York to Connecticut to California, introducing us to a nuanced cast of characters who have shaped Caycedo-Kimura’s experience as a person and a poet. We meet parents, friends, neighbors, priests, lovers, in-laws, uncles, and aunts, making this one of the most human—and humane—collections I’ve encountered in years. Even more impressive, Caycedo-Kimura’s vision also looks outward, offering unique perspectives on two violent countries and how one’s identity is shaped by both. Caycedo-Kimura’s work reminds me of Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Ada Limon, and Ilya Kaminsky in its ability to engage both local and global concerns. All Were Limones is smart, tender, and exceptionally well-crafted. I love this book. —Dean Rader, author of Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly

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