Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón
Published 2015 · 32,175 words · about 2 hours at an average pace
How hard is Bright Dead Things to read?
Bright Dead Things scores 52 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- Accessible, conversational diction.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Free lines with clear syntax.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Grief and place handled figuratively.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Compressed, as poetry is.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- A speaker close to the poet.
- Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
- Horses, Kentucky and the dying stepmother recur as figures.
- Ironic distance: 42 out of 100
- Some self-aware turns.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- Poems end on suspension.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Four sections with recurring motifs.
How Bright Dead Things is regarded
Bright Dead Things holds a literary regard score of 55 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.