The Hurting Kind. Poetry by Ada Limón

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón.

“I am the hurting kind.”

What does it mean to be the hurting kind?

To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world?

To divine the relationships between us all?

To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?

With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others’ stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight.

These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish.

And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.

Along the way,we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world.

“Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning’s shade,” writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”

Ada Limón grew up in Glen Ellen and Sonoma, California. A graduate of New York University’s MFA Creative Writing Program, she has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. She is the author of three books of poetry, Lucky Wreck (Autumn House Press, 2006), This Big Fake World (Pearl Editions, 2007), and Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions, 2010). She is currently at work on a novel, a book of essays, and a new collection of poems. Ada Limón became the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States in July of 2022.

The Hurting Kind
by Ada Limón (Author)
Publisher: ‎ Milkweed Editions
May 10, 2022
Language: ‎ English
Hardcover: ‎120 pages
ISBN-10: ‎1639550496
ISBN-13: ‎978-1639550494
$17.99

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