This is a book about the permission to be human and hurting…

Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind is a book I come back to when I need to be reminded that feeling deeply is not a flaw and that attention, in all its rawness and vulnerability, is actually a form of strength. Limón was appointed US Poet Laureate in 2022, and it’s so easy to see why: her work manages to be both intimate and expansive, personal and collective, rooted in the small details of a life while speaking to something much wider about the human condition.

The poems move through the body, through memory, through illness, grief, beauty, anger and love, often in the same breath. Limón writes with an openness that never feels indulgent and never feels guarded. There is a particular honesty in the way she writes about the body – not as an abstract idea, but as something lived in, struggled with, cared for, sometimes resented, sometimes marvelled at. The poems manage to hold the physical and the emotional together, refusing to separate them into neat categories. In a culture that so often asks us to tidy ourselves up, to be palatable, to be presentable, to be more (or to be less) - this feels so important.

What I love most is the way Limón lets contradiction exist, and it’s something that resonates with me so personally. The desire to disappear alongside the desire to be seen; the exhaustion alongside the wonder; the fierce love of the natural world alongside a deep, aching sense of human fragility. And nothing is resolved - but not in a bleak way, in a way that feels alive and real. There is a steadiness in her voice that I find deeply reassuring – a sense that it is possible to be broken and whole at the same time, that we do not have to earn our belonging by being fixed.

For me, this is a book about permission. Permission to be sensitive, to be complicated, to be a person who notices too much and feels too much and is sometimes overwhelmed by it all. In a world that so often rewards hardness, Limón writes from the soft places, and in doing so makes them feel strong. It is, as the title suggests, a book for those of us who are the hurting kind – and who are, quietly, learning to live that way anyway.