Ada Limón
Ada Limón is the author of five poetry collections, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her fourth book Bright Dead Things was named a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, she serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program and lives in Lexington, Kentucky. Source
How to Triumph Like a Girl
I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.
Published:
2015
Length:
Shorty
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2022
2023
Themes:
Strength & Resilience
Womanhood
Literary Devices:
Apostrophe
an exclamatory passage in a speech or poem addressed to a person (typically one who is dead or absent) or thing (typically one that is personified)
Caesura
a break between words within a metrical foot
Enjambment
a line break interrupting the middle of a phrase which continues on to the next line
Imagery
visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work
Personification
the attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing
Rhetorical Question
a question asked for effect, not necessarily to be answered
Simile
a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”