The Hurting Kind
The Hurting Kind / Ada Limon / Milkweed Press, May 2022 - $24 (Hardcover)
Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind is a spellbinding love letter to nature. The collection, separated chronologically into four seasons, opens in the spring with a description of a groundhog on its haunches, stealing tomatoes from a backyard garden. Observing this quotidian scene with unmatched curiosity, the speaker compares herself to the animal, wondering, “Why am I not allowed delight?” From this query onward, Limón revels in the interconnectedness of nature and human experience. Depicting cockroaches, lindens, forsythias, horses, and hawks, she writes of loss, infertility, and cultural and familial legacy with stunning attention to detail.
The Hurting Kind is a balancing act of interiority and exteriority, minute daily occurrences and expansive natural scenes, human feelings and physical manifestations. The collection emphasizes the profundity of nature without human intervention. “Why can’t I just love the flower for being a flower?” Limón asks, calling into question the claims that humans place on nature. After much consumption and conquest, are humans even worthy of naming trees: wondrous, stately beings “shaking off the torrents of rain as if… simply making music”? Alongside these layers of external description, there is an exceptional depth and poignancy to the speaker’s internal world: “I will never be a mother,” the speaker proclaims in one poem which, at its surface, depicts horses on a hillside. In acknowledgement of “the hurting kind,” Limón recognizes painful emotion as just as natural and deeply rooted as trees, flowers, and groundhogs.
By the end of the collection, one feels at home in Limón’s writing, cozied in the familiar and meditative imagery, reluctant to leave. Because Limón’s poetic truths are tightly interlaced with natural descriptions and metaphor, simply reading The Hurting Kind is a delightful practice in self-reflection and in the very observational skills and attunement Limón exercises so beautifully.
--Neena Dzur