The Hurting Kind

An astonishing collection about interconnectednessbetween the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselvesfrom 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 worlds 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 beingsand to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they do not / care to be seen as symbols?

With Limóns remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questionsincorporating 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 mornings shade, writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, she is doing what she can to survive.