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."
