The Hurting Kind

In her sixth collection of poetry, Ada Limón explores autobiographical and reverent observations about the interplay between humanity and the rest of the natural world through four chapters named for the seasons. She begins in “Spring” with “Give Me This,” in which the poet watches a groundhog savor tomatoes from her garden. She asks, “Why am I not allowed / delight?” Her musings on nature and people’s place in it are imbued with the self-aware, brave naïveté of a hand reaching through a gate to a skittish horse. 

Though (or because) the earth is heavy with grief and indifference and though her mother’s horses “would eat the apples / with as much pleasure from / any flattened palm” (“Intimacy”), Limón cannot help but identify with and take solace in the plants and animals around her. This book constantly reckons with her desire to name, claim, and anthropomorphize. Watching two crows clinging to a tree branch, she narrates, “They say, Stop, and I still want / to make them into something they are not” (“Privacy”). 

She writes of imagining faces in flowers in “In the Shadow”: “Why / can’t I just love the flower for being a flower? / How many flowers have I yanked to puppet / as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?” This poetic puppeteering of nature is felt to be “a lazy kind of love” inadequate at subduing human loneliness. By “Winter,” in the final lines of the final poem, she laments, “enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high / water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease, / I am asking you to touch me” (“The End of Poetry”). 

This is a book to read outdoors or under sunlight coming through the Poetry Foundation’s windows. Its title poem, “The Hurting Kind,” is a breathtaking tribute to Limón’s grandparents that illuminates the poignant beauty that can come from refusing to name or reimagine. “Before my grandfather died, I asked him what sort / of horse he had growing up. He said // Just a horse. My horse, with such a tenderness it / rubbed the bones in my ribs all wrong.”