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The award-winning poet's sixth and latest collection, The Hurting Kind, is a testament to the power of
such sensitivity. Limón is fond of watching the world, and though she notes its imperfections, she is also
fond of living in it.
As in her previous notable collections — The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award and
before that, Bright Dead Things was a National Book Award finalist — Limón is acutely aware of the
natural world in The Hurting Kind. And she has a knack for acknowledging its little mysteries in order to
fully capture its history and abundance.
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As an example of this, the poem "The First Fish" stands out. The speaker is at a lake reeling in her very
first "great fish" and "immediately. Disaster on the rod," Limón writes. She wants to release the fish but
an "old tree of a man" yells at her to hang on. Then, "finally seeing / the black carp come up to meet me,
black eye / to black eye," she asks:
only to the fish, but to the whole lake, land, not only for me
The speaker feels "barbarous" — apprehensive not just of the fish eye on her, but also of the eyes of her
"ancestors." "I wanted to catch something; it wanted to live," she writes. So runs the hierarchy of the
world. Yet, as the poem ends, the speaker recognizes the flaws of that order:
But in The Hurting Kind Limón takes her method even further to ask: Isn't wonder enough? The
collection, divided into four parts, moves from spring to winter. The expectation is that the reader's
attention will follow as the seasons change, guided by the poet on where to look, and how.
Yet there is an instant break in that expectation. As in "The First Fish," the poems also reveal that the
reader is being regarded by the world as well.
I could be both an I
This is Limón's push — that to be "eyed" by the world is to be an "I." The poet draws attention to the act
of being seen and asks us to simply let go:
To be made whole
but witnessed.
So we tend to look for answers, as if our "wholeness" relies on knowing our place in the world. And a
poem, vigilant, tracks feelings like it's a job. Limón wonders, could the same poem delight in just being?
In the long titular poem "The Hurting Kind," she writes: "I have always been too sensitive, a weeper /
from a long line of weepers. I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof."
To know one's "kind" – one's lineage – can answer a lot of questions for us. It can connect us to the
world, make us feel less alone. At one point in the poem, the speaker's mother says, "You can't sum it
up" as the GPS reads out instructions on how to get to their destination:
Above all, The Hurting Kind asks for our attention to stay tender. To know that the world is here to both
guide us and lead us astray. Toward the end of the long poem, Limón writes: "I will not stop this
reporting of attachments. / There is evidence everywhere." So don't stop looking. Just be open to what
you may find. And know that the world is watching you, too.