This Big Fake World: A Story in Verse

By
Ada Limón

Long Beach, CA: Pearl Editions, 2007

Chosen by Frank X. Gaspar as winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize, Ada Limon’s This Big Fake World explores a nameless protagonist’s rediscovery of romance after his failed marriage, a story that takes the form of an extended poem sequence.  Gleaning aspects multiple genres, Limon’s work offers readers the subplots, characters, and dialogue of literary fiction while invoking a full range of poetic forms, a combination that remains striking in its coherence as a book-length project.  Narrating individual poems from different points of view, Limon’s work proves reminiscent of Edgar Lee Master’s The Spoon River Anthology, Dave Etter’s Alliance, Illinois, and James Tate’s Memoir of the Hawk, all of which create their own compelling fictional worlds through character sketches in verse. 

When conveying her many characters’ voices and personalities, Limon’s formal range proves one of the strong points of her collection.  Using prose, tercets, numbered lists, and epistles, Limon invokes a variety of narrative approaches while maintaining a sense of stylistic unity throughout.  Often using form to illuminate content, Limon’s templates frequently mirror and further elucidate the situations being described.  Her poem “Our Hero Receives Instructions in a Dream” exemplifies this trend.  Limon writes, for example:   

1.
She lives where the same street intersects
itself so that you cannot take No for an answer.

2.
You must keep down that road of hers,
but try to make yourself small in it,
your head becoming very small there.

Using the detached form of a list to communicate the protagonist’s love for an acquaintance, Limon creates discontinuity between the content of the poem and the template that she chooses.  Suggesting the protagonist wishes for a clear-cut, empirical solution to a more metaphysical dilemma, Limon uses poetic form as a means by which to comment on plot.  This poem, like many of the works in Limon’s collection, suggests new possibilities for poetic technique through this hybrid approach, an undertaking that proves entertaining as well as thought-provoking.

Although novel in her use of form, Limon’s poems often function best within the context of the entire manuscript, proving weaker as individual pieces than as a whole.  Often, singular works from This Big Fake World illuminate one another, a quality that bodes well for the book but detracts from the poem itself.  “His One Act of Vandalism Goes Almost Unnoticed” remains a prime example of this trend in Limon’s work.  She writes, for instance:

Wearing his shirt over his head, which made it hard to see save the buttonholes, he scratched the word HARDLY above the hardware store sign.  It was his first act of vandalism.  He thinks of himself as a hero of sorts, imagines a large hammer sewn on his chest in sequins.  Red tights, nails around his superhero tool belt…He is desperately upset that he was not caught. (22)

While the piece entertains on its own, other poems in the book, which depict the clerk who works at the hardware store and the protagonist’s love for her, imbue “His One Act of Vandalism Goes Almost Unnoticed” with additional significance that does not come across in the piece itself.  Nevertheless, Limon’s work entertains while experimenting, a quality one rarely encounters in contemporary poetry.  A hybrid of form and genre that, for the most part, succeeds wonderfully, This Big Fake World introduces new possibilities for literary technique, inviting readers and writers alike to expand their definition of poetry.