About the Book

From the new introduction by the author:

I expected to meet a stranger, someone naive and very different than what I remember, but Lucky Wreck is not a stranger at all. Lucky Wreck is me at the beginning, at a doorway. It is, quite simply, where ‘I’ began.

The poems in Lucky Wreck trace the excitement of plans and the necessary swerving detours we must take when those plans fail. Looking to shipwrecks on the television, road trips ending in traffic accidents, and homes that become sites of infestation, Ada Limón finds threads of hope amid an array of small tragedies and significant setbacks. Open, honest, and grounded, the poems in this collection seek answers to familiar questions and teach us ways to cope with the pain of many losses with earnestness and humor. Through the wrecks, these poems continue to offer assurance.

Celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Limón’s award-winning debut, this edition includes a new introduction by the poet that reflects on the book and on how her writing practice has developed over time.

Praise for Lucky Wreck 

From the first lines of Lucky Wreck, I was drawn in by this smart, jaunty, musing, quirky voice, and as I read the whole book I felt more and more respect for Ada Limón’s risky, haunting, wonderfully unexpected work.
—Jean Valentine

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by […]

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