Last week, after the killing of right-wing political commentator Charlie Kirk, I found myself in need of completely stepping away from social media. I closed my browser window. I walked away from my computer. I didn’t need online discourse, I needed poetry.

Luckily, I had already started a dive into U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s collection “Startlement: New and Selected Poems,” set for release on September 30.

The book includes work from Limón’s six previous collections plus 21 new poems, including “In Praise of Mystery,” written for NASA’s Europa Clipper and engraved on the hull of the spacecraft bound for one of Jupiter’s moons.

When I came across “The Same Thing,” I found a poem that could have been written today. “There’s an awful story in the news,” it begins. Limón goes on to des

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