The Hurting Kind: Poems

This collection is a testament to why Ada Limón is and will continue to be my favorite contemporary poet. Her mastery of encapsulating the rapture of a moment, an emotion, a memory and sending it straight to your heart with a sucker punch is exactly why I have a line of hers tattooed on my ribs.

The back cover says this book is about interconnectedness, which of course, it is – but isn't everything? To family, to history and our ancestors, to nature, to our past and future selves.

I felt a distinct sense of fatigue throughout, which no doubt has something to do with the pandemic that looms in background, but also the poet reckoning with aging. There's a sense of fatigue in thinking that to be human is to be separate and special, when really, we're all just animals. There's the poet's fatigue of making everything symbolic, and the constant need to be unique, versus the peace that comes from just being in the world.

But more than fatigue, these poems have a distinct sense of appreciation for the interconnectedness. Limón takes special care to call things by their name, to see them as they are: “What is it to be seen the right way? As who you are? A flash of color,/ a blur in the crowd,/ something spectacular but untouchable.” Sometimes a crow is just a crow, not a metaphor: “They do not care/ to be seen as symbols...”. We are humans and we are complex, but we are also just animals – animals of the hurting kind: “I have always been too sensitive, a weeper/ from a long line of weepers. / I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.”

So many of these poems I've reread and will continue to cherish and reread. There's so much more here to think through and unpack than this short review affords.