The Hurting Kind
Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize
One of the Best Books of the Year, 2022 — NPR
Notable books of 2022—New York Times
One of the most anticipated books of 2022
— LitHub
A top-ten poetry title for 2022
—Publisher’s Weekly
Editor’s Choice
—Booklist
Best Poetry of 2022
—Library Journal
One of the Best Reviewed Poetry Collections
— LitHub
ISBN: 978-1-63955-049-4
Publish Date: 05/10/2022
Pages: 120 / Size: 8.5 × 5.5 × 0.25 in / Weight: 11 oz
Order:
Books Are Magic or Strand Book Store (for signed copies) / Milkweed / Bookshop / IndieBound / Barnes & Noble / Books-a-Million / Amazon
Praise:
“Again and again the clarity of vision and depth of emotion in this lovely book turns the ordinary on its head, asking us to slow down, to see the world askew, and thus anew. Tinged with grief and longing, and buoyed by wonder in the natural world and the possibility of human connection, these are poems that seem to move effortlessly—in the way that only a deft touch can do. The precision of syntax—at once plainspoken and fiercely lyrical—unfolds its revelations masterfully and with a kind of grace that is often heartbreaking. The Hurting Kind is a marvel.”
— Judges citation, Griffin Poetry Prize
"In her sixth collection of poetry, The Hurting Kind, Ada Limón seeks to find the intimate connections between the seemingly disparate in the everyday: humans and the natural world, the living and the dead, the intellectual and the spiritual. The collection’s title is apt—it is a testament to the innate power of feeling, whether grief, rage, or tenderness. For Limón, the current Poet Laureate of the United States, who declares herself “too sensitive, a weeper… the hurting kind,” even the seemingly banal facets of our existence deserve not only observation but also empathy and amazement." — TIME Magazine, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2022
"Ada Limón’s sixth and latest collection is a testament to the power of sensitivity. As with her previous award-winning books, The Carrying and Bright Dead Things, these poems are acutely aware of the natural world. And Limón has a knack for acknowledging nature’s little mysteries in order to fully capture its history and abundance. For her, evidence of poetry is everywhere. She connects big ideas – fear, isolation, even death – with little details, like field sparrows, a box of matches or “the body moving / freely.” Above all, The Hurting Kind asks for our attention to stay tender." NPR, Books We Love
"The Hurting Kind is a book of living language — and nowhere more than in the way words animate the poems. . . . [A] vivid riff, not least because it’s funny; I love a poem that makes me laugh. Still, let’s not overlook the technical achievement: the flow of the images, one into another, the echoes that reverberate almost like slant rhymes. . . . Throughout her work, the language is direct and unadorned while also playful and full of unexpected turns. Something similar is true of The Hurting Kind, which is a quieter book — but no less fierce for being so. . . . When Limón exclaims, in the last line of the poem and the collection, “I am asking you to touch me,” she is writing out of the darkness of the pandemic, but she is also addressing something more universal and profound. What are words worth if they can’t help to bridge the gaps between us? It’s a question many of us are asking as we try to navigate this fallen world."—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
“Limón’s poems are unique for the deep attention they pay to both the world’s wounds and its redemptive beauty. In otherwise dark times, they have the power to open us up to the wonder and awe that the world still inspires."—Ezra Klein Podcast, The New York Times
“The seemingly abundant wisdom of the natural world is really a vision of her own searching reflection. . . . Limón is great company in the presence of the inchoate, able and willing to stand with her readers before the frightening mysteries and hopeful uncertainties of the everyday.” — New York Times Book Review
“Limón is acutely aware of the natural world in The Hurting Kind. And she has a knack for acknowledging its little mysteries in order to fully capture its history and abundance.... The power of attention, Limón conveys, is in finding out just how an individual's experience might fit into the collective experience. But in The Hurting Kind Limón takes her method even further to ask: Isn't wonder enough?... Above all, The Hurting Kind asks for our attention to stay tender. To know that the world is here to both guide us and lead us astray. Toward the end of the long poem, Limón writes: 'I will not stop this reporting of attachments. / There is evidence everywhere.' So don't stop looking. Just be open to what you may find. And know that the world is watching you, too.” — NPR
“"Ada Limón is a bright light in a dark time. Her keen attention to the natural world is only matched by her incredible emotional honesty.... Considering the arc from youthful vibrancy to protective camouflage, Limón tracks the beauty of wisdom as we age. Reconciling the all too human matter of our lives within the spectacle of nature, Limón archives a suspended grace.... The Hurting Kind ... explor[es] the restorative connections between human life and the natural world. The poems reckon with vulnerability and grief in a startling and broken world." — Vanity Fair
“Limón calibrates exteriority and interiority to great effect, shifting in and out of distance and proximity, from the vast span of nature to the minutiae of our lives. . . . That Limón is able to inhabit both past and present in the same moment is part of what makes her poetry so evocative; that she can express it so finely is what makes her an exceptional poet. . . . In all her work, Limon examines language, often questioning rubrics and those who establish them. She is both icon and revolutionary, breaking arbitrary rules, especially if they seek to contain what is poetry, and who it is for . . . Through this stunning collection, throughout her brilliant career, Limón manages the impossible—summing up life—from a multitude of perspectives, unforgettable images, and with verse and silence. The seasons end, lives end, love ends, and then it all begins again. Therein lies our grief. Therein lies our hope."—Chicago Review of Books
"The Hurting Kind displays familiar forms—slim paragraphs with entrancing line breaks; blanks between stanzas that hold tension but don’t make you hold your breath. The horses and birds and vistas are there, yes, but there’s more family and maybe more grief, too. Throughout is the trademark wonder, and blown-out perceptivity, underscoring Limón’s clarion melancholy." — San Francisco Chronicle
"Ada Limón has perfected a kind of lyric movement on the page, a passionate thinking, a stylized form of speech that—in her latest book, The Hurting Kind—is more intimate than ever, and puts me in mind of that old idea that poetry is 'overheard speech.' That to get to the place of seeing or saying, the poet must create the illusion of sharing something with some particular unseen other, which we listen in on. . . . Intimacy itself is the poet’s concern, and she likes to take a single word and bring out all its resonances and possibilities into an urgent braid of image and rhetoric. . . . She is an artist of the feeling of thought, in Eliot’s phrase, an artist of the sensual mind. . . . Many poems in . . . [The Hurting Kind] take a commonplace and make it luminous. . . . A book, then, not only about feeling, about the power and the burden of feelings, about the depth of pain matching the heights of pleasure, but also a collection by a poet always wary of easy sentimentality, who knows it’s easy to fall for." — Guardian
“In Limón’s newest collection, she writes poems suffused with nostalgia, longing, and grief, divided up by the seasons, writing of nurturing seeds, steadfast love, grief, burial. She writes of joyful wonder and powerful grief. Of getting high and staring up at cherry trees, of earning a cat’s trust, of seeing the neighbors get a tree cut down, all tangled up in stories of emotionally manipulative relationships and family discoveries and what real love looks like. Mainly, she writes about what it’s like to be “the hurting kind” of person — a tender kind of person, sensitive to the pain she sees and the small joys she glimpses out in the world, soft, vulnerable, painfully empathetic. It’s the kind of person I am, and I saw myself so deeply in these poems. Limón’s hit it out of the park once again.” — BookRiot
“"Poetry readers have come to expect greatness from Limón, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the National Book Award, and that is exactly what the author offers in The Hurting Kind. . . . My most brief statement on the quality of this collection is this: If you have space to teach just one book of poetry, make it The Hurting Kind. . . . What Limón manages with The Hurting Kind is rare; the poems are at once highly specific and yet broadly relatable, both technically masterful and easily comprehensible. In sum, this collection works equally well for both the avid poetry enthusiast and the reluctant reader. If I was going to try and convince someone that poetry is our most important verbal art, I would start with The Hurting Kind. . . . The Hurting Kind is a collection that begs to be shared, and one that will inevitably show signs of wear as readers carry it with them for weeks at a time."—The Poetry Question
"The winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry returns with a new collection driven by sensitivity: to emotions, to love, and to the connections between people and the animal world. At the center here is an appreciation for nature and for family—parents, in particular. Written during the pandemic, the book does not shy away from loss but simultaneously embraces joy and beauty." — Alta, 18 New Books for May
"In the book’s complex and gorgeous six-part title poem, an elegiac meditation on the mortality of her grandparents and entire ways of pre-digital and agricultural life, Limón lays out what she means by 'the hurting kind.'. . . Limón practices an ethics of care—not only of caring herself but also of trying to get others to do the same. . . . Praising artists for their authenticity can be perilous given that art itself is constructed and artificial. Yet, in all of her books, Limón radiates a profound good faith. Even when she’s being critical—of human behavior, of unfavorable circumstances—she’s nonetheless constructive, issuing not condemnations of some permanently abased state but rather delivering astute observations and implying that readers might dig into their own best impulses and do better. . . . In these decidedly pessimistic and chaotic times, Limón’s radical sincerity and goodwill feel revolutionary. . . . The Hurting Kind is [also] a field guide for living on a damaged planet—for acknowledging the suffering inflicted by human choices and the way people often unmake ecologies and also the way people could choose to preserve and remake them. . . . Life-affirming can be another blurber’s cliché, but Limón’s affirmations shimmer so brightly they cannot be denied." — Poetry Foundation
"Limón affords constant dignity to those whose fragilities are too often framed as liabilities, those who can’t (or won’t) avoid the incessant constellating of experience and memory. . . . Again and again, The Hurting Kind carves space for those who accept their role as witness, those who “endure time…loss and grief and reckoning” ('Banished Windows') with grace and conviction. . . . For all life’s sufferings, through a myriad of hurts, The Hurting Kind refuses numb detachment or an easy forgetting." — Ploughshares
"The poems in all four sections of The Hurting Kind cultivate wisdom in domesticity.... Limón allows herself to ask, in front of us, basic questions like 'Am I suffering now? Or now?' Or 'What is lineage/ if not a gold thread of pride and guilt?' There are endless things to say about the articulate, complex emotional resonance of the poems in this book. Still, what Limón says about 'a life' is true as well for her book: 'You can’t sum it up.'” — Brooklyn Rail
“The Hurting Kind arrives at just the right moment, a tender exploration of what it means to be connected to the world and the pain and joy of daily living when such things feel increasingly difficult.” — Chicago Review of Books
“Once again, Ada Limón has written a book I don’t want to put down. I find the intensity of her honest interior and environmental explorations spellbinding" — Camille Dungy, Orion Magazine
"The tender, arresting sixth collection from Limón is an ode to the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that characterizes the natural world. . . . Limón’s crystalline language is a feast for the senses, bringing monumental significance to the minuscule and revealing life in every blade of grass." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
"An understated, powerful, unforgettable collection, and no doubt one of the best of this year." —Booklist, starred review
“These poems home in on how grief makes us human. In 'The End of Poetry', Limón’s stark final line reminds readers that we are nothing without connection.” — Los Angeles Times
”Limón here honors nature’s abundance, the kindness extended to a child in pain, the beauty of horses and kingfishers, and the enigmatic behavior of our pets. And of her stepfather's kindness. But she doesn’t avoid darkness. Her words help us express our own sorrow, articulate our own losses.” — Oprah Daily
"In The Hurting Kind, she touches on the pain of living in the world today (the wounds of the natural world, the pandemic between us), but it is not all sorrows. There is a levity to some of these lines. You don’t have to look hard to see the joy and the small celebrations of the things that bind us to one another. The Hurting Kind is a book composed of our connective tissue." — LitHub
“In one of Ada Limón’s early poems, she asks, ‘Shouldn’t we make fire out of everyday things?’ For the past 16 years, that’s exactly what she’s done.” — Washington Post
“One of the greatest challenges of our time is to see the living world as having value beyond us. To acknowledge the damage done. What if, Limón appears to be asking in this remarkable book, the best we have made, the finest instrument we know, is our language of love?” — John Freeman, Alta
“Her collection encompasses both the microcosm of a jar full of scorpions and the epic proportions of the mythic Fireball and Eden’s expulsion. She interweaves legendary La Llorona with stories of her grandmother fiercely proud of her Mexican progeny and a lover in whose steadfast presence the speaker finds solace. The solitary Romantic on the craggy cliffs, she is staring intently at all the world has to offer.” —Shannon Nakai for The Cortland Review
From the publisher: 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.”
Praise from Booksellers:
“[A] tender and intimate new collection, in which Limón asks what it means to be ‘the hurting kind’ . . . to be both perceptive and permeable to the delicate strings that connect us to each other and to the world around us. All I can say is Ada Limón never misses! Each poem is a stone in the poet’s hand being turned over and over to reveal its quartz-qualities, its secret radiances, its prismatic reflections. Lucid, as ever.” —Serena, Books Are Magic, “Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2022”
“Ada Limón’s latest collection has poems for each season that transcend the page and bloom into wilderness, tenderness, hauntings, loss, all in such distilled, but grounded language. This collection speaks to our current times, reminding us of our deep connection to nature, the animal in each of us, our ghosts, the loss of something that never existed. Her writing is as enduring and intuitive as the trees.” —Julie Jarema, Avid Bookshop
“The Hurting Kind reminds us to remain open and tender to the world, even with all of its hard edges. I found myself enthralled with her poems of companionship, both human and animal. Limón’s lyric style propels me toward what I love most about poetry, the liminal space between rapture and pain.” —Halee Kirkwood, Birchbark Books
“I read this book while sitting in my favorite chair, covered with a lap blanket as the furnace kept winter outside. As I reflected on this wonderful collection, the day’s worries evaporated and sleep came easily. I highly recommend an evening of immersion with this prose which is so beautifully written.” —Todd Miller, Arcadia Books
“Reading this collection made me feel like I was standing outside with my bare feet in the grass, scrunching my toes in the soil, feeling the breeze on my face, and pondering the oneness of everything.” —LeeAnna Callon, Blue Cypress Books
“The Hurting Kind is the poetry you want to read over and over again because of the magical relationships [Limón] develops between humans and nature. As a fellow bird lover, it sealed my understanding of how important birds are in the universe.” —Easty Lambert-Brown, Ernest & Hadley Booksellers
“Absolutely lovely poetry that reads like a love letter to our flying feathered friends . . . The entire collection exquisitely touches on grief and pain as well as the beauty to be found in nature.” —Vicki Honeyman, Literati Bookstore
“I owe a debt of gratitude to Ada Limón. I had never had a deep relationship with poetry, and then someone introduced me to her wondrous world and I have been seeking out poetic beauty ever since . . . I absolutely love her new offering, The Hurting Kind. ‘Not the Saddest Thing in the World’ is a gem that sparkles in the soul. I would love to know what your favorite will be from The Hurting Kind.” —Linda Bond, Auntie’s Bookshop
