Böcker av Ada Limn

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow Ada Limón.“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón. “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 Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores 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. But The Hurting Kind is 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 Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”

The speaker in this extraordinary collection finds herself multiply dislocated: from her childhood in California, from her familys roots in Mexico, from a dying parent, from her prior self. The world is always in motion both toward and away from usand it is also full of risk: from sharks unexpectedly lurking beneath estuarial rivers to the dangers of New York City, where, as Limn reminds us, even rats find themselves trapped by the garbage cans theyve crawled into. In such a world, how should one proceed? Throughout Sharks in the Rivers, Limn suggests that we must cleave to the world as it keeps opening before us, for, if we pay attention, we can be one with its complex, ephemeral, and beautiful strangeness. Loss is perpetual, and each persons mouth is the same / mouth as everyones, all trying to say the same thing. For Limn, its the sayingindividual and collective that transforms each of us into a wound overcome by wonder, that allows the wind itself to be our own wild whisper.