The Hurting Kind
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The Hurting Kind
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Narrated by:
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Ada Limón
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Written by:
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Ada Limón
About this listen
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.”
©2022 Ada Limón (P)2023 Milkweed EditionsWhat the critics say
An Indie Next Selection for May 2022
A Publishers Weekly “Top Ten Most Anticipated Book of Poetry” for Spring 2022
A Literary Hub “Most Anticipated Book of 2022”
A Books Are Magic “Most Anticipated Book of Spring 2022”
A New York Times, "100 Notable Books of 2022"
Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
"So grateful am I for Limón's powerfully observant eye. There are many wonderful poems here and a handful of genuine masterpieces . . . The Hurting Kind is packed with quiet celebrations of the quotidian . . . Limón forces herself to confront, again and again in these poems, nature's unwillingness to yield its secrets—it's one of her primary subjects. The seemingly abundant wisdom of the nature 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
"I can always rely on an Ada Limón poem to give me hope, but Limón's poems don't give us the kind of facile Hallmark hope; rather, her hope is hard-earned, even laced with grief or happiness . . . Limón is a master at making a simple idea (that of hindsight, seeing the bright side of things) askew. 'And so I have/two brains now,' she writes. 'Two entirely different brains.' Limón gives us two brains in her poems, too, revealing new ways to view the world."—Victoria Chang, New York Times Magazine
"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, 100 Must Read Books of 2022