“Imagine you must survive without running,” Ada Limón writes in one of The Carrying’s (Milkweed) early poems, and for a while I can imagine nothing but that. But then, a few pages later, she writes, “Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward/ the thing that will obliterate us . . .” and I think, yes, I imagine that is also true. On and on this book goes, making me imagine the world in one way and then another. Consider her poem “American Pharoah,” in which the speaker is quite literally sick and tired but is forced to leave the house to see some horse “not even race, but/ work.” She’s a grump, the poem’s speaker, just like I am so often grumpy and tired and sick of it all. And so too is “some horse racing bigwig” who is certain this horse must be overrated. Isn’t so much of what this world sells us overrated? The blooming trees and the dogs and the dandelions and the tomatoes and the dreams we have of the people we love or the people we hope to love or the people we hope will come back or will never leave us? Aren’t all of these overhyped, destined to disappoint us one way or another? Limón’s poems know how skeptical we are. How skeptical we should be. How we have every reason to doubt the stories we have been sold. She’ll start a poem letting us see a gorgeous layer of snow “outlining the maple like a halo.” Then, in the next line, clarify that the snow actually looks like “a fungus.” The world, she is not afraid to say, is full of ugly. But, even later in the poem, she’ll “stare at the tree and the ice will have melted, so/ it’s only the original tree again, green branches giving way// to other green branches, everything coming back to life,” and I will begin to understand, again, that the stories we tell ourselves about the world are important because they make things more beautiful than they really are, and because they make things more terrible than the really are, and, here’s the really crucial thing, because they make us see things as they really are, as well. Like the grumpy horse racing bigwig who couldn’t believe in American Pharoah’s splendor until he saw it at work with his own eyes, thanks to the way Ada Limón sets the world galloping before me, I am invited to reconsider my doubts. I stand next to Limón gaping in wonder. The contradictions that are the diastole and systole of nature do their work on my closed-hearted, one-track thinking until, like the horse racing bigwig, I say, “