Poetry Book Club: The Hurting Kind

featuring The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón, hosted by Lisa Roberts

Join us for this inaugural session of Poetry Book Club, a new program from Iowa City Poetry! We'll gather together for a casual and lively conversation about The Hurting Kind, the sixth poetry collection by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

DATE

Tuesday, August 27

TIME

6:30-7:30 CST

Location

There are two ways to join us! In person or online. To attend in person, head to @ PS1 Close House, 538 South Gilbert St., in Iowa City. To attend online, register to get the Zoom Link. 

READING

Feel free to bring along your own copy of the book. If you can't get one right now, we've provided a PDF with a short selection of poems from the collection. See that here:  https://docs.iowacitypoetry.com/The-Hurting-Kind-Excerpt.pdf

Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate and the editor of the national bestselling anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World. She is the author of The Hurting Kind and five other collections of poems, including The Carrying, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Bright Dead Things, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her children’s book In Praise of Mystery will be published in October 2024. Limón has received both a Guggenheim and a MacArthur Fellowship, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review. She now resides in California where she was born and raised.

THE HURTING KIND

Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize
Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
A NPR “Book We Love”
A BookRiot “Best Book of the Year”
An Indie Next Selection, selected by booksellers

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow Ada Limón.

“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón. “I am the hurting kind.” What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?

With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others’ stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.

Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. “Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning’s shade,” writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”