The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón

The Hurting Kind: Poems by Ada Limon
Published by Milkweed Editions on May 10, 2022
Genres: Poetry
Pages: 120
Format: eBook
Source: Library
Purchase on: Amazon// Barnes & Noble
Add to: Goodreads
rating
five-stars

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist 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.”

Review

This is literally just amazing. The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón is one of my favorite books this year, likely these past few years. This poetry collection speaks to the very essence of my soul. Practically half the collection has been highlighted as my favorite. The words are so painfully beautiful in their sincerity.

I absolutely recommend this to anyone and leave you with one of my favorite lines from a poem title

Stillwater Cove

[…]
we had no time for the waiting
that was required. To watch
the waves until the whales surfaced

seemed a maddening task. Now, I am
in the inland air that smells of smoke
and gasoline, the trees blown leafless by

wind. Could you refuse me if I asked you
to point again at the horizon, to tell me
something was worth waiting for?

five-stars

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