Ada Limón

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."

The Hurting Kind

Lindsay

It is what we do in order to care for things, make them ourselves, our elders, our beloveds, our unborn.

But perhaps that is a lazy kind of love. Why can't I just love the flower for being a flower?

How many flowers have I yanked to puppet as if it was easy for the work to make flowers?

Sure, sure, it’s so obvious, that’s who to root for, the thing almost dead

The American linden sways nonplussed by the storm, a bounce here, a shimmy there, just shaking like music

left over from the night’s end wafting into the avenues before sleep.

What is it to be seen in the right way? As who you are? A flash of color,

a blur in the crowd, something spectacular but untouchable.

rapid and legendary. The color of the earth.

I did not want to throw myself in. Instead

I’d watch the whiptails skitter in dust.

Sisters of the small quiet pleasure of edges

But mostly I remember the flitting of lizards,

how later, I read that the New Mexico whiptail

parthenogenesis, asexual and yet genetically diverse.

Yellow lines run the length of their gray bodies

with vibrant blue-green tails when they’re young.

And as they age, their scales, their whole body changes,

until only the faintest blue remains, and safer now,

they become the earthen color of the river.

Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

What good is accuracy amidst the perpetual scattering that unspools the world.

There is a truth in that smooth indifference, a clean honesty about our otherness that feels not like the moral but the story.

But haven’t we learned by now that just because something is bound to break

doesn’t mean we shouldn’t shiver when it breaks?

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