The Hurting Kind: Poems

Now in paperback! With over 60,000 hardcover copies in print, the astonishing collection about interconnectedness--between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselvesfrom U.S. Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow 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.

Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States. She is the editor of the You Are Here anthology and the author of five collections of poems, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. She's also the author of the picture book In Praise of Mystery based on the poem engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper. Limón is a MacArthur Fellow, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a TIME Woman of the Year. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review. She lives in Glen Ellen, California.