Limón responds in her poetry to what she identifies as an ecological imperative to re-describe our relationship to 'nature' in a manner that isn’t merely instrumental. The moving personal dramas that her poems detail can never be separated from the landscape in which they occur ... Her poetry, which can feel so intimate and self-revealing, is almost constantly political at the same time ... What I might contribute, at the expense of seeming geeky, are some comments on the technical brilliance of Limón’s work, as it is seldom mentioned elsewhere ... Most of the lexicon and sentence patterning throughout this poem— and Limón’s other poems— could easily be spoken in conversation. It’s characteristic of Limón’s style that her language reads as both speech and as heightened 'non-speech.' It’s a difficult balancing act ... Limón isn’t a naive writer; her poetics are informed and slyly in conversation with a historical body of literature ... The poems in all four sections of The Hurting Kind cultivate wisdom in domesticity ... There are endless things to say about the articulate, complex emotional resonance of the poems in this book. Still, what Limón says about 'a life' is true as well for her book: 'You can’t sum it up.'
To praise a book as luminous or dazzling is usually to resort to a blurber’s cliché. However, Ada Limón’s sixth collection of poetry, The Hurting Kind, really does shimmer, albeit in the specific sense of the word the late anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose employed. This shimmer is essentially the radiant pulse of life across ecologies, as understood by the Aboriginal Yarralin people of Australia, among whom Rose conducted research on flying foxes ... Limón’s new work continues and expands the vulnerability and ecstasy of her previous collections ... Wild and domestic, the landscapes and animals of both places come to life in her work ... offers insight into that process [of identity construction] and how one can feel its benefit creatively and ethically ... In these decidedly pessimistic and chaotic times, Limón’s radical sincerity and goodwill feel revolutionary ... a field guide for living on a damaged planet—for acknowledging the suffering inflicted by human choices and the way people often unmake ecologies and also the way people could choose to preserve and remake them ... Life-affirming can be another blurber’s cliché, but Limón’s affirmations shimmer so brightly they cannot be denied.
Limón invites readers once again to share in revelatory moments as told from within an autobiographical context. But the force of this collection is more outward-facing, focusing especially on how we, as human beings, are interconnected with other natural phenomena (plants, animals, birds, distant stars), with each other, and with our ancestors ... organized in four parts around the seasons, a schema that maintains the primacy of the natural cycle. These poems, in turn, attempt to move beyond personal epiphany, reimagining ways of regarding nature that aren’t egocentric ... Limón’s attempt to love the world more generously through acts of attention raises The Hurting Kind to a whole new level of ambition and achievement ... Limón risks emotional transparency, even deliberate naiveté, to make the case for loving the world even as it breaks our hearts.
For poet Ada Limón, evidence of poetry is everywhere ... The Hurting Kind is a testament to the power of such sensitivity ... Limón is acutely aware of the natural world in The Hurting Kind. And she has a knack for acknowledging its little mysteries in order to fully capture its history and abundance ... The power of attention, Limón conveys, is in finding out just how an individual's experience might fit into the collective experience ... The Hurting Kind asks for our attention to stay tender.
For 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.
Her hope is tentative, hedging. Limón’s consolations are small but strong, and when her poems look to the future, it’s usually in the service of creating a connection in the here and now ... That 'you' is all important in Limón’s work — a wide-open beloved who is us, of course. Such a capacious embrace is a consolation, and it’s no mean literary feat ... The Hurting Kind, strikes me as a transitional work, less certain of itself and its purpose than its predecessor, but also trying some new things, including longer poems ... There are a few poems that don’t quite fly, landing too soon on a sentimental or overly hopeful conclusion or overreaching for emotional heft ... And yet, I soon find myself forgetting my little qualms, so grateful am I for Limón’s powerfully observant eye. There are many wonderful poems here and a handful of genuine masterpieces ... It’s music — Limón’s excellent ear for the rhythms of speech and the sounds of sentences ... If Limón sometimes looks too hard for the bright side, it’s because she acknowledges the darkness everywhere. It’s only when a poet pretends that the mysteries of the unspeakable can be solved with words, that language can and should take the uncertainty out of the questions, that poems fail. Limón, though she is sometimes guilty of optimism, has no such illusions.
Limón is at her best in her most recent collection ... Poetry readers have come to expect greatness from Limón...and that is exactly what the author offers ... Limón utilizes various forms to explore everything from the loss of loved ones to the impact of divorce, often juxtaposing these experiences with images of nature that act as a conduit for the author’s philosophical awakening ... Let me first admit that this collection stopped me in my tracks. I cannot pretend to be objective about it, in large part because I have been flooding text messages with lines from Limón’s poems for weeks. Every time I promised a friend that I wouldn’t send another poem, I broke that promise within minutes. My most brief statement on the quality of this collection is this: If you have space to teach just one book of poetry, make it The Hurting Kind ... a collection that begs to be shared, and one that will inevitably show signs of wear as readers carry it with them for weeks at a time. Almost every page offers lines that I am compelled to share with those around me.
Limón affords constant dignity to those whose fragilities are too often framed as liabilities, those who can’t (or won’t) avoid the incessant constellating of experience and memory ... The Hurting Kind carves space for those who accept their role as witness ... The Hurting Kind refuses numb detachment or an easy forgetting.
The poems in The Hurting Kind embody such an existential tension: the terror of dislocation and loneliness, the intention to record (or see) things as they are ... a book of living language — and nowhere more than in the way words animate the poems ... I love a poem that makes me laugh. Still, let’s not overlook the technical achievement: the flow of the images, one into another, the echoes that reverberate almost like slant rhymes ... Scene is an odd word to use in regard to a poem, but for Limón’s work it feels right ... a quieter book — but no less fierce for being so ... When Limón exclaims, in the last line of the poem and the collection, 'I am asking you to touch me,' she is writing out of the darkness of the pandemic, but she is also addressing something more universal and profound. What are words worth if they can’t help to bridge the gaps between us? It’s a question many of us are asking as we try to navigate this fallen world.
As much about the delights of our convoluted existence and universe as it is about the suffering that all living entities endure ... Thematically, this is ground that Limón has covered in past collections, yet—again like each season—it feels decidedly new, and deeply generative. Limón calibrates exteriority and interiority to great effect, shifting in and out of distance and proximity, from the vast span of nature to the minutiae of our lives ... That Limón is able to inhabit both past and present in the same moment is part of what makes her poetry so evocative; that she can express it so finely is what makes her an exceptional poet ... In all her work, Limon examines language, often questioning rubrics and those who establish them. She is both icon and revolutionary, breaking arbitrary rules, especially if they seek to contain what is poetry, and who it is for ... There is a gorgeous irony in her artful and heartful work: she eloquently expresses the limitations of language to capture the most complicated aspects of our existence, whether it is nature or love or grief ... Through this stunning collection, throughout her brilliant career, Limón manages the impossible—summing up life—from a multitude of perspectives, unforgettable images, and with verse and silence.
... a collection of poems entangled with pervasive sorrow ... Amid the gradual ravages of time, as if from an impulse to preserve what can be preserved, many of these poems keep looking to family members, and the past ... The structure of The Hurting Kind underscores the ways that memories of a few family members and friends, dead and still living, are permanent parts of one’s mental landscape ... The natural world itself is another recursive subject, with joyful and distressing implications. As with Limón’s previous work, if you observe and delight in nonhuman life, you start observing what nonhuman life endures, largely at the hands of humans ... I want to end by emphasizing both the funniness and the earnestness audible in these encounters, enhanced by the formal possibilities of surprising line breaks, traces of set rhythms, and unlooked-for internal rhymes.
... momentous ... Limón presses her reader to consider the quiet celebrations, the surprising discoveries of the self, the unshakeable reality of love in the landscape of suffering ... Are cycles, then, a kindness or an evil? Amid their inevitable movement, the constant example of yet another area where we humans have so little control, the speaker asserts agency by thwarting, challenging, resisting the life that hurts her. She is deliberate in choosing, naming, declaring her own magnificence, but at the same time, she refrains from leaving an indelible mark on the world.
Sparkling ... The poet’s bright and clear-eyed lyrics extract the most profound tenderness from the simplest moments ... Limón measures time in evocative, unexpected ways ... An understated, powerful, unforgettable collection, and no doubt one of the best of this year.
... nearly 60 poems that run like a river in early spring: serene and musical from a distance but, up close, piercing and boundless and full of unexpected life ... Limón demonstrates her singular skill, drawing on both the natural world and humanity, both broken and beautiful ... Limón's poems often perform this kind of sleight of hand, hiding a kernel of pain inside a loosely closed fist. Each time, however, the magician's palm opens to reveal not emptiness but peace or light.
... contains, in short, so much hurt yet so much comfort. Vulnerable and strikingly written, The Hurting Kind explores suffering as it exists alongside love and beauty in a rich, complicated, and often troubled world. Dualities abound throughout the collection. Life and death, pain and delight, and connection and longing twine together through these poems that speak to memory, family, friendships, and connection to the natural world ... The collection also abounds in stunning imagery, and Limón’s knack for conjuring arresting lines is at its best when she situates images with unexpected company ... Limón’s whole work is a testament to the conjoined nature of these dualities. In doing so, she strikes a balance that could be difficult to achieve: allowing each of those emotional spaces room to be stated without smothering the other. She recounts suffering as earnestly as delight without overdramatization and offers examples of love and beauty without sugarcoating.
Their subjects are familiar— cats, dogs, horses, the landscape, family, lovers, the wistful longing for children, the body’s betrayals. But their span is generous. In these poems, Limón is always aware of how language/the poem is not the destination—rather, it’s what comes back and offers the opportunity for openings into further possibility.
The collection brims with the kind of highly polished, emotionally resonant, and musically dynamic poems characteristic of their creator ... To read The Hurting Kind is to cycle through a series of the same four or five formal templates, which, despite each poem’s unmistakable singularity on the levels of meaning, emotion, and sound, comes to impose something dangerously similar to monotony on not just this collection, but on the past decade of Limón’s poetic output ... Limón’s gift for spinning dynamism out of her subjects keeps that danger always at bay, but her lack of experimentation in the formal dimension leaves uncultivated an entire axis of poetic potential.
Tender, arresting ... Limón’s descriptions of animals are richly evocative ... Limón’s crystalline language is a feast for the senses, bringing monumental significance to the minuscule and revealing life in every blade of grass.
