Ada Limón
On our wonder | wander | women blog this week we had just written to celebrate April as National Poetry Month — where we posted some of our personal list of favorites.
We realize just how short that lineup was and are sure to keep adding to it in time. On wonder | wander | world today, we are growing it with the addition of Ada Limón.
With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought her latest work, The Hurting Kind incorporates others’ stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns — always reaching a place of startling insight.
These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. 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. 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. / She is doing what she can to survive.
Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Limón is also the host of the critically acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poems, The Hurting Kind, will be released by Milkweed Editions in May of 2022.
I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates you, and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in, but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain. ~ Ada Limón
Originally published at http://woaworld.blogspot.com.
