An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the
human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate
and MacArthur Fellow 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.”