“I am very much myself on the page, and I like that about my work,” Limón said. “But in so doing, sometimes people think that they know me intimately.” On occasion, she said, she’ll be talking to a person for five minutes before she realizes they’ve never met.
Now, both writing and performing are vital to her work, she said, and she is always thinking about the musicality of the words as she writes. But the woman who shows up onstage is “utterly antithetical” to the poet who dreams up the work.
“My poet self is super spacey, can’t hold a conversation,” she said, laughing. “That is the person who’s wandering off and saying, ‘Oh, how long have I been in the backyard? I’ve been watching the birds for three hours.’”
When she turns on the performer, however, “I get there five minutes early, I make sure that I eat something,” she said. “I bring my Type A.”
In her most recent book, she said, she was interested in things that can go on without her — the book has four sections, each named for a season.
The collection is dedicated to her stepfather, Brady T. Brady, who is one of her early readers, along with a small group of poets including Jennifer L. Knox and Matthew Zapruder. Brady went from high school to fighting in the infantry in Vietnam, and never studied poetry. But his guidance of her writing has been valuable since she was a child, Limón said. Once, when she was 15, she called him at work to read a poem she’d written.
“I started reading it in this very poetic voice, and he was like: ‘Wait, no,’” she said. “‘Just read it to me like you’re telling me something.’ And I read it that way, in my natural voice, and then he could hear it.
