Exploring the Intricacies of Memory with Ada Limón

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The poet Ada Limón—whose latest collection, “ Startlement ,” went on sale this week—recently bought and moved back into her childhood home, where she lived from the time she was an infant until she was fifteen. The experience, she said recently, has been like “living inside my memories.” While writing about this period of her life, she has found herself drawn to books that examine the ways in which people relate to their own pasts—and how these acts of self-narration might conflict with the accounts offered by other people, and by history. Limón, who was the U.S. Poet Laur