The Hurting Kind

Poetry

The Hurting Kind

Poems
FROM U.S. POET LAUREATE ADA LIMÓN

"There are many wonderful poems here and a handful of genuine masterpieces"–NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
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Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
An NPR "Book We Love"
A BookRiot "Best Book of the Year"
An Indie Next Selection for May 2022
A Los Angeles Times Recommended Read for May 2022
A Publishers Weekly 
Top Ten Most Anticipated Book of Poetry for Spring 2022
A Literary Hub “Most Anticipated Book of 2022”
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.”

Keywords: 
poetry; nature poems; animals; horses; Kentucky; fish; family; stepfamily; parents; stepparents; grandparents; natural world; nature; family; mortality; trees; love poems; family poems
ISBN:
9781639550494
Publish Date: 
05/10/2022
Pages: 
128
Size: 
8.5 × 6 × 0.5 in
Weight: 
11 oz
Author

Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate as well as the author of The Hurting Kind and five other collections of poems.

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