RaveSan Francisco ChronicleFor fans of previous collections, 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.
Nicola Derobertis-Theye
RaveThe San Francisco Chronicle... a coolly observed literary deconstruction ... this wandering bildungsroman unfolds as self-realization: gradually, thoughtfully, around the metaphor of city as self. This meditation on history, identity and family questions how and why we form the stories we tell about ourselves ... Suited to patient readers seeking something measured and esoteric, who, like Gabriele, prefer questions to answers.
Nadia Owusu
PositiveSan Francisco Chronicle... a genre-straddling epic ... The story builds in concentric if not entirely closed circles around this set of characters and the places they call home, delving into questions of identity, belonging, Blackness, motherhood and family ... Aftershocks offers an incredible account of a life both privileged and fraught, and a rigorous accounting of living as heir and stranger to so many histories, voices and identities.
Jane Hirshfield
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleHirshfield’s hand is deft ... an exploration of the capacity for life, its value and purpose ... a pleasure to read. Hirshfield’s collection does exactly what we expect, and a little more — more of the personal, more of the contemporary world and its problems, more transcendence through art.
