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.”
Table of Content
1. Spring
Give Me This
Invasive
Swear On It
Drowning Creek
Sanctuary
A Good Story
In the Shadow
Forsythia
And Too, the Fox
Stranger Things in the Thicket
Glimpse
The First Lesson
Anticipation
Foaling Season
Not the Saddest Thing in the World
Stillwater Cove
2. Summer
It Begins With the Trees
Banished Wonders
Where the Circles Overlap
When It Comes Down To It
The Magnificent Frigatebird
Blowing on the Wheel
Jar of Scorpions
The First Fish
Joint Custody
On Skyline and Tar
Cyrus & the Snakes
Only the Faintest Blue
Calling Things What They Are
“I Have Wanted Clarity in Light of My Lack of Light”
Open Water
Thorns
The Mountain Lion
3. Fall
Privacy
It’s the Season I Often Mistake
How We See Each Other
Sports
Proof
Heart on Fire
Power Lines
Hooky
My Father’s Mustache
Runaway Child
Instrumentation
If I Should Fail
Intimacy
4. Winter
Lover
The Hurting Kind
Against Nostalgia
Forgiveness
Heat
Obedience
The Unspoken
Salvage
What is Handed Down
Too Close
The End of Poetry
About the author
Ada Limón is the author of The Hurting Kind, as well as five other collections of poems. These include, most recently, The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limón is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review, among others. She is the former host of American Public Media’s weekday poetry podcast The Slowdown. She now resides in California where she was born and raised.
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