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4.28 AVERAGE
4.28 AVERAGE
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
‘What good
is accuracy amidst the perpetual
scattering that unspools the world.’
‘You can’t sum it up. A Life,’ writes poet Ada Limón in her newest collection The Hurting Kind, but don’t worry because she employs all the poetic brilliance to dig away at the ruffage of existence to find the shape of life lived in the past few years. Honing in on themes of grief, intimacy, family and the natural world, this rightfully celebrated poet returns better than ever in a quiet collection that nonetheless screams out for understanding and interconnectedness in the face of ever growing disconnect with the basic elements that unify us as people who should love and foster humanity. Limón dives headfirst into the territory of poetry giants like [a:Mary Oliver|23988|Mary Oliver|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1634180145p2/23988.jpg] for her wry social commentary told through observations of the natural world and [a:Jane Hirshfield|110180|Jane Hirshfield|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1304011693p2/110180.jpg] for the awareness that nature does not give a single fuck about our narratives and through that we can find peace, and delivers poem after poem—broken into four sections dedicated to each season—that cry out for empathy and communal understanding as a bulwark against the waves of grief that dash upon all our shores. She asks ‘to be made whole / by being not a witness / but witnessed,’ and we are all better for witnessing her words.
The End of Poetry
Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower
and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,
enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy
and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis
of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god
not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,
enough of the will to go on and not go on or how
a certain light does a certain thing, enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up, 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 ego, enough
of the mother and the child and the father and the child
and enough of the pointing to the world, weary
and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,
enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.’
There is a call for intimacy that is likely to resonate with any reader regardless of level of poetic investigation, which is something I’ve always found that Limón excels at. The surface readings of her poems hit with full force while there is a depth to explore for those who seek it, and we all walk away with an enlightenment that resides in our mind for days to come. It works so well because her work feels universal even when embodying a personal experience, from poems about family and missing the moment as a child when her father shaved his beard because ‘even then, / I was too attached to life.’ The attachment to life becomes a beautiful idea across this collection, one that clearly points towards the Covid crisis without ever naming it and finds solace in the peace of wild things around her during this time. It becomes a reminder we are small players in a large world where nature does what it wants independent of our high-stakes political skirmishes and social conflicts. 'I was nothing to that bird, which wasn't / concerned with history's bloody battles,' she writes in Drowning Creek while observing that, to a bird, it has no use or acknowledgement for the dark name. 'There is a solitude in this world / I cannot pierce. I would die for it.' Or in And, Too, the Fox, she observes how the fox has no use for her:
The idea of nature being unconcerned with our lives feels like a letting go, a freedom to exist and be at peace with our temporality that recalls a lot of what I love about Hirshfield. There is a calmness to much of her poetry that careens through the natural world, taking note of it and letting it wash over us. It reads much like taking note of the world around us during times when many people stayed home during the early days of the pandemic. ‘Why / can’t I just love the flower for being a flower,’ she asks in In the Shadow before asking ‘How many flowers have I yanked to puppet / as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?’ If nature is our peace, our home and our survival, why do we find it so easy to uproot it, to make it a possession. When observing a bee on a flower in Invasive (a poem about a loved one receiving a diagnosis for a terminal illness), she notes they are ‘two things radiating life. I need them both / to go on living.’ Nature takes away, but also heals.
‘Violence is done and history
records it. Gold ruins us. Men ruin us.
That’s how the world
was made, don’t you know?’
Not all is peaceful and calm here, however, and Limón does not shy away from the difficult subjects of death, grief, and the ways people can bring harm upon one another. Or themselves, pleading with her own life in Salvage saying ‘I am sorry. / I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.’ There is the desire to ‘be the fixer’, to comfort, mend and heal those around her, to return the favor to family members now that they are aging. ‘Show me how you did it, all those years, / took something that needed repair and repaired it.’ As much as there are poems of loneliness and isolation, Limón extolls interconnectedness and the ways we can make the world and our individual lives better through the sharing of grief, the sharing of aid, and the sharing of love.
‘Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?’
In an interview writes that ‘life is so full of suffering that we forget sometimes how hard it is for anyone to live, let alone flourish…“I want to honor all those people in my life who made room for me to live, who allowed me to be porous and tender to the world, who allowed me to be an artist.’ This book is a wonderful tribute to her family and friends that appear in her work, crafted in such a moving way as to remind us all of the power of family, friendship and community. She also plays with fun themes, such as writing a poem in the spirit of the [a:Alejandra Pizarnik|112534|Alejandra Pizarnik|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1487112985p2/112534.jpg] or a poem about watching sports, with poems being anywhere from a dozen lines to the multi-page titular poem that delivers a massive emotional weight. Ada Limón returns with a collection just as good as any before and with a wisdom and maturity that soars straight into your heart.
5/5
A Good Story
Some days—dishes piled in the sink, books littering the coffee table—
are harder than others. Today, my head is packed with cockroaches,
dizziness and everywhere it hurts. Venom in the jaw, behind the eyes,
between the blades. Still, the dog is snoring on my right, the cat, on my left.
Outside, all those rosebuds are just getting good. I tell a friend, the body,
is so body. And she nods. I used to like the darkest stories, the bleak
snippets someone would toss out about just how bad it could get.
My stepfather told me a story about when he lived on the streets as a kid,
how he’d, some nights, sleep under the grill at a fast food restaurant until
both he and his buddy got fired. I used to like that story for some reason,
something in me that believed in overcoming. But right now all I want
is a story about human kindness, the way once, when I couldn’t stop
crying because I was fifteen and heartbroken, he came in and made
me eat a small pizza he’d cut up into tiny bites until the tears stopped.
Maybe I was just hungry, I said. And he nodded, holding out the last piece.
is accuracy amidst the perpetual
scattering that unspools the world.’
‘You can’t sum it up. A Life,’ writes poet Ada Limón in her newest collection The Hurting Kind, but don’t worry because she employs all the poetic brilliance to dig away at the ruffage of existence to find the shape of life lived in the past few years. Honing in on themes of grief, intimacy, family and the natural world, this rightfully celebrated poet returns better than ever in a quiet collection that nonetheless screams out for understanding and interconnectedness in the face of ever growing disconnect with the basic elements that unify us as people who should love and foster humanity. Limón dives headfirst into the territory of poetry giants like [a:Mary Oliver|23988|Mary Oliver|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1634180145p2/23988.jpg] for her wry social commentary told through observations of the natural world and [a:Jane Hirshfield|110180|Jane Hirshfield|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1304011693p2/110180.jpg] for the awareness that nature does not give a single fuck about our narratives and through that we can find peace, and delivers poem after poem—broken into four sections dedicated to each season—that cry out for empathy and communal understanding as a bulwark against the waves of grief that dash upon all our shores. She asks ‘to be made whole / by being not a witness / but witnessed,’ and we are all better for witnessing her words.
The End of Poetry
Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower
and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,
enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy
and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis
of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god
not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,
enough of the will to go on and not go on or how
a certain light does a certain thing, enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up, 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 ego, enough
of the mother and the child and the father and the child
and enough of the pointing to the world, weary
and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,
enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.’
There is a call for intimacy that is likely to resonate with any reader regardless of level of poetic investigation, which is something I’ve always found that Limón excels at. The surface readings of her poems hit with full force while there is a depth to explore for those who seek it, and we all walk away with an enlightenment that resides in our mind for days to come. It works so well because her work feels universal even when embodying a personal experience, from poems about family and missing the moment as a child when her father shaved his beard because ‘even then, / I was too attached to life.’ The attachment to life becomes a beautiful idea across this collection, one that clearly points towards the Covid crisis without ever naming it and finds solace in the peace of wild things around her during this time. It becomes a reminder we are small players in a large world where nature does what it wants independent of our high-stakes political skirmishes and social conflicts. 'I was nothing to that bird, which wasn't / concerned with history's bloody battles,' she writes in Drowning Creek while observing that, to a bird, it has no use or acknowledgement for the dark name. 'There is a solitude in this world / I cannot pierce. I would die for it.' Or in And, Too, the Fox, she observes how the fox has no use for her:
’[the fox] never cares how long you watch,
never cares what you need
when you’re watching, never cares
what you do once he is gone.’
The idea of nature being unconcerned with our lives feels like a letting go, a freedom to exist and be at peace with our temporality that recalls a lot of what I love about Hirshfield. There is a calmness to much of her poetry that careens through the natural world, taking note of it and letting it wash over us. It reads much like taking note of the world around us during times when many people stayed home during the early days of the pandemic. ‘Why / can’t I just love the flower for being a flower,’ she asks in In the Shadow before asking ‘How many flowers have I yanked to puppet / as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?’ If nature is our peace, our home and our survival, why do we find it so easy to uproot it, to make it a possession. When observing a bee on a flower in Invasive (a poem about a loved one receiving a diagnosis for a terminal illness), she notes they are ‘two things radiating life. I need them both / to go on living.’ Nature takes away, but also heals.
‘Violence is done and history
records it. Gold ruins us. Men ruin us.
That’s how the world
was made, don’t you know?’
Not all is peaceful and calm here, however, and Limón does not shy away from the difficult subjects of death, grief, and the ways people can bring harm upon one another. Or themselves, pleading with her own life in Salvage saying ‘I am sorry. / I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.’ There is the desire to ‘be the fixer’, to comfort, mend and heal those around her, to return the favor to family members now that they are aging. ‘Show me how you did it, all those years, / took something that needed repair and repaired it.’ As much as there are poems of loneliness and isolation, Limón extolls interconnectedness and the ways we can make the world and our individual lives better through the sharing of grief, the sharing of aid, and the sharing of love.
‘Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?’
In an interview writes that ‘life is so full of suffering that we forget sometimes how hard it is for anyone to live, let alone flourish…“I want to honor all those people in my life who made room for me to live, who allowed me to be porous and tender to the world, who allowed me to be an artist.’ This book is a wonderful tribute to her family and friends that appear in her work, crafted in such a moving way as to remind us all of the power of family, friendship and community. She also plays with fun themes, such as writing a poem in the spirit of the [a:Alejandra Pizarnik|112534|Alejandra Pizarnik|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1487112985p2/112534.jpg] or a poem about watching sports, with poems being anywhere from a dozen lines to the multi-page titular poem that delivers a massive emotional weight. Ada Limón returns with a collection just as good as any before and with a wisdom and maturity that soars straight into your heart.
5/5
A Good Story
Some days—dishes piled in the sink, books littering the coffee table—
are harder than others. Today, my head is packed with cockroaches,
dizziness and everywhere it hurts. Venom in the jaw, behind the eyes,
between the blades. Still, the dog is snoring on my right, the cat, on my left.
Outside, all those rosebuds are just getting good. I tell a friend, the body,
is so body. And she nods. I used to like the darkest stories, the bleak
snippets someone would toss out about just how bad it could get.
My stepfather told me a story about when he lived on the streets as a kid,
how he’d, some nights, sleep under the grill at a fast food restaurant until
both he and his buddy got fired. I used to like that story for some reason,
something in me that believed in overcoming. But right now all I want
is a story about human kindness, the way once, when I couldn’t stop
crying because I was fifteen and heartbroken, he came in and made
me eat a small pizza he’d cut up into tiny bites until the tears stopped.
Maybe I was just hungry, I said. And he nodded, holding out the last piece.
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Some beautiful and deep poems in here. Loved "A good story" and "Glimpse", and also this excerpt from "Banished wonders" had me in my feelings:
"Mistral writes: I killed a woman in me: one I did not love. But I do not want to kill that longing woman in me. I love her and I want her to go on longing until it drives her mad, that longing, until her desire is something like a blazing flower, a tree shaking off the torrents of rain as if it is simply making music."
🥹
Ada Limon is a visionary. Her poetry speaks to the jagged edges of living in a body in this world, in this time... This book was healing, and I'll keep it nearby to return to often.
"[...]How much more drama
can one body take? I wake up in the morning and relinquish my dreams.
I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness.
Once, I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger.
I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war."
"[...]How much more drama
can one body take? I wake up in the morning and relinquish my dreams.
I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness.
Once, I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger.
I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war."
emotional
hopeful
fast-paced
NYT Notable Books 2022: 25/100
This is one of those books that made me want to buy a copy for everyone I know. It's obvious why Limon was the Poet Laureate. Her work is beautiful and moving and accessible. I love how much she talks about birds and how it's clear she's not pandering to an audience. There was so much variety in her poems, in length and in style. If you want to get into modern poetry, this is a great place to start.
This is one of those books that made me want to buy a copy for everyone I know. It's obvious why Limon was the Poet Laureate. Her work is beautiful and moving and accessible. I love how much she talks about birds and how it's clear she's not pandering to an audience. There was so much variety in her poems, in length and in style. If you want to get into modern poetry, this is a great place to start.
"What good is accuracy amidts the perpetual scattering that unspools the world."
I remember the last year of cross country. I would stare out over the grassy courses we had just run knowing it would be the last time. I spent long moments scanning and remembering the faces of runners from other teams. I was losing something I had made a sort of home in, and I was feeling that loss. As I start to near the end of Ada Limon's work, I feel much the same. Spending days with each poem. Doing my best to remember this home I have found in here words. I guess "Savoring" would be the more succinct way of saying this; for people who are into that sort of thing. All this to say, I have found a favorite writer, which of course means, I must begin mourning the loss of this joy that I exist in. My unfortunate way of loving.
I remember the last year of cross country. I would stare out over the grassy courses we had just run knowing it would be the last time. I spent long moments scanning and remembering the faces of runners from other teams. I was losing something I had made a sort of home in, and I was feeling that loss. As I start to near the end of Ada Limon's work, I feel much the same. Spending days with each poem. Doing my best to remember this home I have found in here words. I guess "Savoring" would be the more succinct way of saying this; for people who are into that sort of thing. All this to say, I have found a favorite writer, which of course means, I must begin mourning the loss of this joy that I exist in. My unfortunate way of loving.
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
emotional
reflective
sad
poems of grief and nature and being human and also not
dark
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced