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A review by maryp626
The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón
2.0
I would like to preface this with, I have deep love in my heart for Ada Limón and I review this so meticulously so that I can get an understanding of the type of writer I am via understanding what I’m not drawn to in poetry and why.
Anyways, I’m not going to lie this one didn’t do it for me, at least not right now in this present moment…i have a feeling I’ll come back around to this and love it at some point.
This collection felt like one that was focused on form. I’m the biggest NOT fan of whatever the two line poetry template is, it’s hard for me to get invested when there’s line breaks that don’t have any meaning other than “I’ve committed to writing this poem in sets of two lines”.
Something i kept thinking over and over while reading this is “I think she had writers block and resorted to the same 3 exercises to get her brain going”…I’m sorry it just felt like the same 3 poems over and over and over. The aforementioned couplet-ish poem, a narrative poem about her family (that either didn’t offer much I hadn’t read about already or was completely focused on the narrative of the story rather than the poetry of it), and a poem about nature…her specialty of course but something about them kept falling flat. While there is usually profound meaning delicately explicated in these scenes, these poems felt like she was just telling us about the scene and expected us to do the leg work of finding the poetry in it. Which I’m sure many people can do but as someone who is not very connected to nature, especially Kentucky nature, I felt like I was reading field journals and that’s it.
There was also some uncharacteristically cliche lines scattered consistently throughout that were jarring enough to take me out of the mood because…it just all seemed so, unlike her.
Tbh there were only a few dog-eared pages when usually it’s 80% of the book.
Maybe it’s my fault, i can barely relate to poems about family, i can never relate if those poems are about grandparents, I’m not a nature gal and maybe I’m doing that thing where I expect (demand) pain from an artist, rejecting anything that’s less than a gut wrenching hurt as “not good enough”.
But she said it best herself….“Why am i not allowed delight?”
Of course “The End of Poetry” changed the course of my life. I’ve had that memorized for months, repeat it to myself daily. Those words held me together when everything was falling apart so I’m grateful to this collection for birthing that. There aren’t words to describe what that poem does for me, how it holds my whole life in its hands.
Anyways, I’m not going to lie this one didn’t do it for me, at least not right now in this present moment…i have a feeling I’ll come back around to this and love it at some point.
This collection felt like one that was focused on form. I’m the biggest NOT fan of whatever the two line poetry template is, it’s hard for me to get invested when there’s line breaks that don’t have any meaning other than “I’ve committed to writing this poem in sets of two lines”.
Something i kept thinking over and over while reading this is “I think she had writers block and resorted to the same 3 exercises to get her brain going”…I’m sorry it just felt like the same 3 poems over and over and over. The aforementioned couplet-ish poem, a narrative poem about her family (that either didn’t offer much I hadn’t read about already or was completely focused on the narrative of the story rather than the poetry of it), and a poem about nature…her specialty of course but something about them kept falling flat. While there is usually profound meaning delicately explicated in these scenes, these poems felt like she was just telling us about the scene and expected us to do the leg work of finding the poetry in it. Which I’m sure many people can do but as someone who is not very connected to nature, especially Kentucky nature, I felt like I was reading field journals and that’s it.
There was also some uncharacteristically cliche lines scattered consistently throughout that were jarring enough to take me out of the mood because…it just all seemed so, unlike her.
Tbh there were only a few dog-eared pages when usually it’s 80% of the book.
Maybe it’s my fault, i can barely relate to poems about family, i can never relate if those poems are about grandparents, I’m not a nature gal and maybe I’m doing that thing where I expect (demand) pain from an artist, rejecting anything that’s less than a gut wrenching hurt as “not good enough”.
But she said it best herself….“Why am i not allowed delight?”
Of course “The End of Poetry” changed the course of my life. I’ve had that memorized for months, repeat it to myself daily. Those words held me together when everything was falling apart so I’m grateful to this collection for birthing that. There aren’t words to describe what that poem does for me, how it holds my whole life in its hands.