“How to Triumph Like a Girl” is the opening poem of Ada Limón’s fourth book of poems, Bright Dead Things. It won the 2015 Pushcart Prize, a prestigious American poetry award. The poem is brief, direct, and at times funny as it explores issues of feminism and self-confidence using the “lady horses” (Line 1) racing the day before the Kentucky Derby as metaphors for female power. It is emblematic of Ada Limón’s work which makes repeated use of animals and animal imagery to explore human feelings. Limón is a prime example of an Eco Feminist writer, one who explores the connections between human beings—specifically women—and nature and seeks to uphold the value of all living things. Limón’s other poems explore what it means to be an American with Mexican heritage, connections with her family, and the ways we look for, find, and express love. She uses tenderness, humor, and optimism to explore sometimes difficult subjects, which has made her a popular American poet of great renown.

Poet Biography

Ada Limón was born March 28, 1976 and raised in Sonoma, California. She is of Mexican American descent and is the daughter of a visual fine artist. As a college student, Limón studied drama at the University of Washington and went on to get her MFA at New York University. While she was there, she studied with poets such as Mark Doty, Marie-Howe, Philip Levine, Agha Shahid Ali, Tom Sleigh, and Sharon Olds, whose poems inspired her to become a poet. After college Limón was awarded a fellowship to live and write at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her first two books both garnered major awards in the same year–Lucky Wreck (Autumn House Press, 2006) won the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize and This Big Fake World (Pearl Editions, 2006) won the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize.

In 2011 Limón moved with her husband to Lexington, Kentucky. All of her subsequent collections were published by Milkweed Editions–Sharks in the River (2013), Bright Dead Things (2015, nominated for a National Book Award), The Carrying (2018), and The Hurting Kind (2022). Both Bright Dead Things and The Carrying make use of the imagery of Kentucky and the horses Limón sees in her day-to-day life. She continues to split her time between Kentucky and Sonoma.

Poem Text

Limón, Ada. “How to Triumph Like a Girl.” 2015. The Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The poem begins with a simple declaration: “I like the lady horses best” (Line 1). The speaker says she likes “how they make it all look easy” (Line 2). In the case of the “lady horses” what they make look easy is “running 40 miles per hour” (Line 3). The speaker says she likes their “lady horse swagger, / after winning” (Lines 5-6). She imagines that the horses are saying to one another “Ears up, girls, ears up!” (Line 6). Then the speaker comes to a slight shift, saying “But mainly, let’s be honest, I like / that they’re ladies” (Lines 7-8). She draws attention to the gender of the horses. Then she compares the horses with herself, saying “As if this big / dangerous animal is also a part of me” (Lines 8-9). Now the speaker takes an imaginative leap, thinking less about the horses and more about herself. She imagines

that somewhere in the delicate

skin of my body, there pumps

an 8-pound female horse heart,

giant with power, heavy with blood (Lines 10-13).

The speaker jumps from the physical aspects of her imagined horse heart to the psychology of having a horse heart noting that this heart and the one who has the heart “thinks, no it knows, / it’s going to come in first” (Lines 17-18).