A Review of Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind — June 21, 2022 by Rachel Shin
Our lives for the past two years have demanded exercises against loneliness. For Ada Limón, author of the acclaimed Bright Dead Things, this endeavor took shape as her recently released sixth poetry book The Hurting Kind. In pandemic fashion, Limón’s flashes of connection occur from a distance and are nonetheless tender for their remoteness. She zeroes in on the intimacy of witnessing, saying on the First Draft podcast that “as a human, what we need is not only to be seen but to be beheld.” In The Hurting Kind, to behold is part act of worship, part act of service. Human and animal lock eyes throughout the collection; however, Limón makes their exchange productive rather than combative. In the poem “In the Shadow,” she senses a primeval shrug of anthropomorphizing and independently checks herself: “I am always superimposing / a face on flowers…Why / can’t I just love the flower for being a flower?” Striving to appreciate nature ungilt by imagination is an ongoing effort. Elsewhere in “Privacy,” Limón’s proclivity for superimposition receives a direct rebuff:
On the black wet branches of the linden, still clinging to the umber leaves of late fall, two crows land. They say, Stop, and still I want to make them into something they are not. Odin’s ravens, the bruja’s eyes.
Two crows reject literary circumscription, asserting themselves in the very language in which Limón threatens to inscribe them. Still, she poeticizes the birds into something they are not, expanding their winged perimeters to contain natural resistance to interpretation. She reckons that external perception, the ever diligent smith of human anxieties, benefits from a kingdom of other patrons. In “Privacy” and the larger collection, Limón muses that the human-animal divide, while distinct, is porous.
Limón establishes gaze as a universal currency, penning the traffic of glances across species’ borders. The Hurting Kind tabulates their import, from unwanted to invaluable. A lucid, outside regard is nothing short of an exaltation, she posits in “Open Water,” recounting her late friend’s brush with a deep-sea fish:
But I keep thinking how something saw you, something was bearing witness to you out there in the ocean where you were no one’s mother, and no one’s wife, but you in your original skin; right before you died, you were beheld, and today in my kitchen with you now ten years gone, I am so happy for you.
Like two crows, a woman wants to shed worldly designations: the constricting garments of mother, wife, Odin’s ravens, and the bruja’s eyes pile indiscriminately on the floor. Limón’s eye for these precious linking threads underpins The Hurting Kind’s appeal. Her poems are telescopic; we peer through them to find tiny moments of enormous electricity—a split-second, piscine glance beneath a ten-year gulf surfaces with fresh drama.
However, the meticulously attentive gaze which Limón casts upon the world works best when transliterated on a local scale. She shines in magnification over amplification. In “The First Fish,” her emotional thrust sputters as she scales the subject too dramatically. She lands a black carp and begins intimate repentance but zooms out abruptly:
the black carp come up to meet me, black eye to black eye. In the white cooler it looked so impossible. Is this where I am supposed to apologize? Not only to the fish, but to the whole lake, land, not only for me but for the generations of plunder and vanish.
The pivot from private to collective apology loses some control of the poetic vehicle. In explicitly implicating lake, land, and past generations, Limón releases the intensity of their duologue—division dilutes. As in “Open Water,” woman and fish lock eyes, but this scene operates strongest when the two-party gaze remains unbroken.
The Hurting Kind also puts family history in conversation with ecological themes. The touching “Cyrus & the Snakes” remembers Limón and her brother’s childhood accidental killing of an unhatched chick, and the weariness of human ruination that follows Cyrus into manhood. She praises her brother’s polite appetite for natural beauty: he needs to apprehend a wild thing “only for a second, long enough to admire it fully.” Limón writes the poem to honor her brother, overlapping the circles of honoring, poeticizing, and beholding.
Cyrus, who Limón is sure would cry if he “wasn’t a boy in the summer heat,” also introduces her “long line of weepers.” The collection’s title is a familial classification for a brood too sensitive, too alert to the invisible sorrows teeming on the surfaces of things. Her narratives impressively indulge this inherited sensitivity without bending to cynicism.
While the delicateness of Limón’s inherited gaze leaves her often bruised, it also endows her with the tenderness necessary for beholding. In the six part titular “The Hurting Kind,” Limón’s telescopic eye scans across a generational horizon and fixes on the progenitor of her sensitivity.
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.
What sort? Even when prompted, her grandfather does not costume his beloved steed as a symbol or paint upon it some unwanted face. The only ornament he attaches is My. Reaching through the years, he clasps this single jewel of tenderness gently on. The sparsity of his response at once strikes us and Limón; we recall her chastising herself at the book’s start, “Why / can’t I just love the flower for being a flower?” Her grandfather’s response affirms Limón’s surmise that the art of beholding rejects categorization. Subjects of admiration glow when they are just—or rarely, joyfully, My.
In a time when we can often do little but behold each other—from behind masks or screens—Limón tells us how to do it right. The Hurting Kind encourages bearing witness to things as they are, in singular splendor.
