Book cover of The Hurting Kind

Book description

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness-between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves-from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon.

"I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers," writes Limon. "I am the hurting kind."…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Hurting Kind as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

What I love most about this collection is how it begins with an ending: printed on the inside jacket flap of the book is the end poem, 'The End of Poetry,' which demands an end to the intangibles of poetic clichés and calls instead for physical sensation.

The intense desire to be touched is heightened with the COVID-19 pandemic hanging over each poem; the pandemic is never named, but I felt the ache of social distancing. The pandemic is another kind of catastrophe, one that is tenderly and vividly captured in this book.

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On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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