We are living through a perverse time for the arts, when a sitting President can defund the publisher of the sitting United States Poet Laureate. In what was meant to be the Trump administration’s first step toward completely dismantling the National Endowment of the Arts, grants to thirty-eight publishers and journals were terminated, including The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Electric Literature and Nightboat Books. Then-Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s term lasted long enough to see her publisher come under the axe.

In May, Milkweed Editions was one of the groups that received letters informing them their NEA grant would not be forthcoming; they lost $50,000 overnight. Milkweed Editions has been Limón’s publisher for over a decade, putting out four volumes of award-winning poetry as well as the anthology of nature-centric poems she edited as Poet Laureate. While the White House’s attack on small presses and local arts organizations was more sledgehammer than scalpel, defunding the publisher of the sitting Poet Laureate was a pointed message that prestige and status are no protection in this culture war.

Ada Limón’s work has always been sledgehammer of a different kind: demolishing divisions between human and non-human life, between the social and the natural. Like her Milkweed colleague Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the blockbuster Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge (2020), Limón sees humans as stewards and students of the natural world, not exploiters and masters—hardly a perspective that props up a White Christian Nationalist project.

Her new volume, Startlement, collects works from six earlier books of poetry, (including the much lauded Bright Dead Things [2015], The Carrying [2018], and The Hurting Kind [2022]), as well as twenty-one new ass-kicking poems. It is a powerhouse, as both a retrospective of a master and an insistent prod to notice, notice, notice our phenomenal existence.

Her voice  remains that of an intimate friend sharing joy or pain, plainly, but irresistibly. In “Instructions on Not Giving Up” (originally published in The Carrying and a social media favorite during the pandemic), she watches the summer showcase of local trees. Their brilliant “fuscia funnels” and “cotton candy colored blooms” leave a “confetti of aftermath,” but “it’s the greening of the trees/that really gets to me":

Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

These are not nature poems that have some romantic distance between the viewer and the viewed; Limón’s poems are acts of defiance in a culture of isolation and reification. The pressure to conform to the misinformation and distortion of American culture is indicted again and again: in Startlement’s examples of new work, “The Endlessness” sets the tone:

…I thought I was perhaps bad at seeing. Even
color was not color, but a mood. The lamp was
sullen, a candlestick brooding and rude with its old
wax crumbling at its edges, not flame, not a promise
of flame. How was I supposed to feel then? About
moving in the world? How could I touch anything
or anyone without the weight of all of time shifting
through us? I was not, or I did not think I was, making
up stories; it was how the world was, or rather it is how
the world is. I’ve only now become better at pretending
that there are edges, boundaries, that if I touch
something it cannot always touch me back.

In “On Earth As It Is On Earth”, she remembers “myself as I once/was ... composing in my mind/a life without rules, without money, cruelty,/clocks, or clothes.” But she isn’t just longing for lost innocence, because she is “still the same,/ in the green, in the green, waiting out the rain.” And in “Let Loose” she is a part/apart of/from nature:

The mind that wanders, that illuminates
this quaking aspen, this sugar pine, this ponderosa,
and imagines lying against the icy grass, imagines
each trembling green blade soothing nerve endings,
every too-alive glial cell coming to heel.

Limón’s tenacity at refusing to accept the given rules of American capitalism is informed by her otherness as a woman of Mexican heritage. She shows moments of her history full of vulnerability and earnestness, walking us through the hurts that have informed if not limited her. She reflects with heartbreaking nostalgia on girlhood before the coming crush of shame in “Every Blooming Thing”:

Shot out in the sun, those pink
blooms mouth the fall air
like needy fiends brightening
with desire. Long ago, before
I knew the difference between
skin sack and petal, I told my
parents, I wanted to be a naked
lady. Those flamingo flowers
standing tall along the highways,
and backroads. Even when all
the grass was gold and crisp
with flame danger, those lilies,
they never seemed to tire. Never
lost their surprise or their softness.
I didn’t know then it was wrong
to wish to be a naked lady, wronger
even to wish to be a flower.

In the same way that her observations of the minute or banal lead her nature poems to sparks of wonder, witnessing racism leads to sparks of rage. For readers who have lived marginalization, the “fuck you” tone of “This One Goes Out To,” for example, is familiar, maybe even fun. Speaking to the memory of seeing her family pushed into the worst seats in restaurants, she claims the old pain and the brief new pleasure of “the good seat”:

—in my loudness, in my otherness, in my anesthetized pain, I’ll shove all of this in my mouth.
Loudly, brightly, my risky ease drips through
the generations, flick of a wrist, raise a glass
laugh until admonishment, you’re in the good seat,
for one hot minute

These poems are an incitement to participate in life, with our baggage of wounds and disappointments in tow. But, in poem after poem, Limón asserts she was right to trust her mind before the wounds and disappointments were laid on. The possibility is still there—for her, and for us—to take our place in this wondrous existence. And it is for us: “What we are becoming,” she reminds us, “we are becoming together.”

It is unlikely that anyone in the Trump Administration took specific aim at Milkweed Editions for such transgressive messages. But Limón’s emphasis on solidarity, and on our deep integration within natural systems, makes it obvious why small presses are dangerous to a White Christian Nationalist project. Writing about the harmony of the mind and environment wouldn’t feel so political were it not for the brazen, bare-knuckled violence of the MAGA project. And for this, Limón’s poems feel more urgent than ever.