Every Day is Magic: Ada Limón

In her 2015 collection, Bright Dead Things, a National Book Award finalist for poetry, Ada Limón writes of moving to Kentucky: “Confession: I did not want to live here.” It’s perhaps not a surprising sentiment coming from a coastally oriented person who was raised in Northern California, attended college in Seattle, and then spent over a decade in New York City.

 

But Limón and her husband, Lucas, have been in Lexington for seven years now and the effects of settling into this place are noticeable in her new book, The Carrying (Milkweed, Aug.). It’s a phenomenally lively and attentive collection replete with the trappings of living a little closer to nature. While Bright Dead Things is marked by a preponderance of light, such as images of fireflies and neon signs, The Carrying features numerous appearances by various trees, birds, and beetles. Limón also demonstrates a greater willingness to be explicit in naming colors, particularly green. “It’s crazy green, the whole book,” she says. “Lexington is the greenest place I’ve ever lived.” Similarly, where in Bright Dead Things, Limón tells a lot of stories and anecdotes, in The Carrying she is very present in her thoughts and experiences.

As it turns out, these shifts in focus have another, altogether unexpected source. While putting Bright Dead Things together, Limón was diagnosed with chronic vestibular neuronitis, which can cause bouts of vertigo. “If I’m really having vertigo, it’s pretty intense and I really have to focus,”
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Mónica Villamizar

“Monica Villamizar is a freelance conflict reporter, recently awarded the EMMY Award for Best Investigative Documentary in Spanish and the Gerald Loeb Award for the investigation “The Source”, about child labor in Mexico’s Nestle coffee farms. In 2016 she was nominated for the prestigious One World Media “Journalist of the Year 2015” Award, which honors the best journalists in the world in all forms of media. Her current clients include PBS Newshour, Al Jazeera English, Vice News, Univision, Telemundo and The Weather Channel. Previously she was the London correspondent for CBS News affiliates. She has traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Mali, Mexico, El Salvador and Haiti, at times filming directly on the front lines. She has covered the drug of wars in Colombia and Mexico, gaining exclusive access to cocaine cartels in Medellin and Michoacan. In the Middle East she covered the Arab spring and the advance of ISIS into the Iraqi Kurdistan. More recently she has been dedicated to covering the advance of jihadism in West Africa. In her attempts to tell truthful, hard-hitting stories, she has been targeted by the Egyptian military which raided her office in Cairo and arrested her colleagues, and more recently by the Venezuelan Government who targeted her, labeling her a spy, and issuing an arrest warrant..”
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Poem
“…And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while…”

T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Mexican American Proarchive Annual Report for 2022

The American Community Survey is an annual survey administered by the federal government to help local officials and community leaders and businesses understand the changes that take place in their communities. It includes percentages of our population’s graduate school attainment and the employment of Mexican Americans in various occupations.  These important factors influence the allocation of federal resources. Mexican American Proarchives uses the data provided by the American Community Survey to better understand how Mexican Americans compare to the general population.

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