The Hurting Kind Ada Limn by Ada Limón 9781639550500, 163955050X instant download after payment.

Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize

"There are many wonderful poems here & a handful of genuine masterpieces" — NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human & nonhuman, ancestors & ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner & 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 & joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world & 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 & ways of knowing, making surprising turns, & always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses & kingfishers & the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, & 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 & the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. 

But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection & 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.”