“The Hurting Kind” takes the reader on a long walk through nature and lifetimes to explore the relationships between music and grief, love and death. It’s the sixth collection of poems by American poet Ada Limón, who began her tenure as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States in the fall. “I Ask for Silence,” by Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, serves as the book’s epigraph:
“though it’s late, though it’s night,
and you are not able,
Sing as if nothing were wrong.
Nothing is wrong.”
The opening lines establish a setting — late at night — and the character’s situation — we, the reader, are helpless. Then it contradicts itself. Despite asking for silence and acknowledging our inability to act, the poem also gives us an impossible task: to sing in spite of it all. We are told nothing is wrong, although it seems clear something, or perhaps everything, is wrong. This book, then, is about how we live with this irony. Our silence and our suffering is our reason to sing. Limón encourages us to take Pizarnik’s advice, to sing in such a way that eases our pain even when we’re told not to, even when it doesn’t seem to make sense. We must sing to live.
In congruence with this imagery of a long night, a reminder of the relentless passage of time, Limón organizes her book into four sections, one for each of the seasons. The book begins in “Spring.” In “Give Me This,” the speaker recalls an unexpected encounter with a groundhog munching on her tomatoes, still green. As the speaker watches, the sound of “a small spasm of joy” escapes. Limon writes, “She is a funny creature and earnest, / and she is doing what she can to survive.”
Rather than turn inward to confront grief, Limón finds meaning by looking outward in observation. She shares a moment with another living thing, the groundhog, and discovers something about herself. The final lines could be describing Limón just as well as the groundhog. It’s a delightful little metaphor which encourages us to discover delightful little things ourselves. Such mundane pleasures, unexpected and small, are just what we need to survive.
“Spring” goes on with other natural imagery — flowers, horses, a creek, a fox, a squirrel, a fledgling — each used by Limón to arrive at some greater conclusion. Each element of nature can be a starting point for Limón’s profundity. She continues as she moves into “Summer” — with scorpions, fish, bats, snakes, whiptail lizards and so on — but she becomes more personal. Perhaps the summer heat evokes memories of her youth, as she recounts the distressing story of her first fishing trip in “The First Fish” and gives insight into her psychology as a child of divorced parents in “Joint Custody.”
“Fall” goes even further, shifting focus from memories of her own childhood to including stories of her parents and grandparents, stories Limón never witnessed herself, stories related to her and then related to us. “Fall” is about ancestry and cycles of life. Limón expresses this through her careful craft.
In “It’s the Season I Often Mistake,” Limón writes about confusing falling leaves for birds; sparrows flying into a tree then seem like leaves flying back up into their branches, “like a strong spell for reversal.” We see things return to their former states, see time run back. “Fall” gets to the cyclical and strange nature of life. “What / else did I expect?” she asks, as if we ought to expect things to behave unnaturally at this time, as if we ought to learn to accept impossible things in this scattered world. Perhaps we can appreciate the magic and the beauty of such unknowns.
Limón delivers some of her most powerful poems in “Winter.” She is no longer observing or remembering; she sings from the heart. Love takes precedence as a key theme as she continues to discuss her grandparents. Her husband also becomes more central in “Winter” as their relationship drives “Forgiveness” and “Heat.” Limón even devotes a poem to her dog, comparing the dog to god in “Obedience.”
It’s here in “Winter” that Limón includes the titular poem, “The Hurting Kind.” In accordance with the epigraph, this is a poem about how to live with grief. Limón begins by describing a visit to a funeral parlor after her grandfather’s death. In the car, Limón’s mother says, “You can’t sum it up,” a life. Later in the poem, Limón writes that her grandfather “could never / understand why anyone would want to write // it down.”
Limón chooses to remember her grandfather. She chooses to write about him, despite him believing his life was too ordinary to warrant it. She follows the mandate of the epigraph and ignores suggestions to be silent. Singing, or writing poetry, remains a useful way to make meaning of the pain we inherit.
Limón doesn’t give us all the answers though. In the book’s final poem, “The End of Poetry,” Limón writes:
“… enough of the gun,
the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost
letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and
the ego and the obliteration of the ego, enough
of the mother and the child and the father and the child”
The poem lists tropes and terms associated with art, dramatic, literary and psychoanalytic theory. Limón pokes fun at this litany of images. The repetition — enough of this, enough of that — tires the reader’s ear, evoking the same sickness the speaker feels hearing the same ideas repeated and repeated. It builds and builds until Limón interrupts the form with a stunning final line: “I am asking you to touch me.”
This is not a shameful desire kept secret, nor is it a forceful demand. It is a polite request for love. Limón is merely asking for silence, just as Pizarnik does in the epigraph, seeking an end to suffering. She seems to say that literature is meaningless if we are not touched. We want literature to touch our hearts and minds, yes, but poetry can be archaic and contrived and conceited and tired. We need people to hold us, to hug us, to kiss us. Love beats poetry. Love affects us more directly than metaphor ever can.
This is a humble book. “The Hurting Kind” shows us how poetry might alleviate grief, yet it questions what poetry is capable of. It reveals what makes Limón a great poet and teacher: the depth of her observation and the complexity of her thought. Her brilliance lies in her two minds, her ability to weep and to sing, with a heart full of hurt and love.
