The Hurting Kind

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness–between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves–from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limn.

“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limn. “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 Limn’s remarkable ability to trace thought,The Hurting Kindexplores 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. ButThe Hurting Kindis 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 Limn of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”

Ada Limnis the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate as well the author ofThe Hurting Kindand five other collections of poems. These include, most
recently,The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle
Award and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, andBright
Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the
National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limn is a
recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in theNew
Yorker, theNew York Times, andAmerican Poetry Review,
among others. She is the former host of American Public Media’s weekday poetry
podcastThe Slowdown. Born and raised in California, she now lives
in Lexington, Kentucky.

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions (May 10, 2022)
• Language: English
• Hardcover: 120 pages
• ISBN-10: 1639550496
• ISBN-13: 9781639550494
• Item Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches