The Hurting Kind: Poems
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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.”
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Not my favorite collection of her work. Standouts are drowning creek, banished wonders, and the end of poetry.
This collection is a testament to why Ada Limón is and will continue to be my favorite contemporary poet. Her mastery of encapsulating the rapture of a moment, an emotion, a memory and sending it straight to your heart with a sucker punch is exactly why I have a line of hers tattooed on my ribs.
The back cover says this book is about interconnectedness, which of course, it is – but isn't everything? To family, to history and our ancestors, to nature, to our past and future selves.
I felt a distinct sense of fatigue throughout, which no doubt has something to do with the pandemic that looms in background, but also the poet reckoning with aging. There's a sense of fatigue in thinking that to be human is to be separate and special, when really, we're all just animals. There's the poet's fatigue of making everything symbolic, and the constant need to be unique, versus the peace that comes from just being in the world.
But more than fatigue, these poems have a distinct sense of appreciation for the interconnectedness. Limón takes special care to call things by their name, to see them as they are: “What is it to be seen the right way? As who you are? A flash of color,/ a blur in the crowd,/ something spectacular but untouchable.” Sometimes a crow is just a crow, not a metaphor: “They do not care/ to be seen as symbols...”. We are humans and we are complex, but we are also just animals – animals of the hurting kind: “I have always been too sensitive, a weeper/ from a long line of weepers. / I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.”
So many of these poems I've reread and will continue to cherish and reread. There's so much more here to think through and unpack than this short review affords.
The review is coming soon...https://readerbuzz.blogspot.com/2023/03/us-poet-laureate-ada-limon-visits.html
