The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón is divided by the seasons and the animals that occupy those seasons, but each poem is a close look of what it means to deal with loss, grief, and harm. Calling on nature’s beautiful darkness, Limón equates suffering with living in a way that makes us wonder why some of us feel more deeply than others. What is it that makes us suffer? Our mind? Our feelings? Our connections? She observes: “and she is doing what she can to survive.” (“Give Me This,” pg. 3)
Her poems weave stories like vines wrap around trees and homes. One excellent example is “Forsythia,” in which the narrator is reminiscing with a lover about carrying people with us no matter where we are and how she remembers the name forsythia is with a story of her stepmother Cynthia: “I told him that the way I/remember the name forsythia is that when my stepmother, Cynthia, was dying,/that last week, she said lucidly but mysteriously, More yellow. And I thought/yes, more yellow, … I say, For Cynthia, for Cynthia,/forsythia, forsythia, more yellow.” (pg. 10)
Sadness, memory, and grief are all very personal, even though we all wish it to be more communal. Think of the funerals you’ve attended and how each person reacts differently - some crying and sobbing uncontrollably, others stoic and holding in the tears, and still others laughing and chatting. In “Not the Saddest Thing in the World,” Limón examines this need for connection in grief when a narrator snaps a photo of a buried fledgling to send to relatives, hoping they will feel sadness along with her. She wants them to see the death as she does, more than ordinary, even though it is an inevitability for all of us.
The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón is not about just the grief that follows death. There is the sadness when a kid of divorced parents leaves one home for another in a custody exchange — being happy in the one home and missing the other at the same time. It is a new perspective on love that was merely pain and drama, a sadness that the realization didn’t come sooner. It is regret and missed time and what could have been. It is a grief for a life too short and a want that is bigger than the time alotted to us.
RATING: Cinquain
About the Poet:
Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate as well as the author of The Hurting Kind and 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, 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.
Limón is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review, among others. She is the former host of American Public Media’s weekday poetry podcast The Slowdown. Born and raised in California, she now lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
This sounds like a fantastic collection.