S5, E3: "Instructions on Not Giving Up" by Ada Limón
Description
This is the third episode of the Nature, Wilderness and Wildness series of the podcast.
Ada Limón was born in California in 1976 and was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2022 until 2025.
She is one of the most notable and noteworthy voices in contemporary American poetry. Some of the themes of her work include love, loss, the body, and the natural world. Limon has published eight collections, including 2018’s The Carrying, which included today’s poem and won the American National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
Her latest collection is Startlement, published in 2025, and she also published two recent poetry books for younger readers, In Praise of Mystery (Norton Young Readers) and And, Too, The Fox (Lerner Publishing).
She lives in Kentucky.
Find out more about Ada Limón's life and work here.
You can buy the collection “The Carrying” from Amazon.co.uk here.
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Music credit
MANTRon by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/ Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/






















