Startlement

Praise for Ada Limón's Previous Works:

“Ada Limón is a bright light in a dark time.”—Vanity Fair

“I can always rely on an Ada Limón poem to give me hope, but Limón’s poems don’t give us the kind of facile Hallmark hope; rather, her hope is hard-earned, even laced with grief or happiness. . . . Limón is a master at making a simple idea (that of hindsight, seeing the bright side of things) askew. ‘And so I have / two brains now,’ she writes. ‘Two entirely different brains.’ Limón gives us two brains in her poems too, revealing new ways to view the world.”—Victoria Chang, New York Times Magazine

“A poet whose verse exudes warmth and compassion, Ada Limón is at the height of her creative powers.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Limón is a poet of ecstatic revelation. Her poetry feels fast, full of details, often playful, and driven by conversational voice. This book represents a powerful deepening of the poet’s perspective. . . . It’s a book of deep wisdom and urgent vulnerability, driven by language that feels not only beautiful but permanent and powerfully wrought, like a mountain. It leads you to the beautiful bright mountaintop of language, then guides you gently down into the rocky valleys of a conscious human heart.”—Tracy K. Smith, Guardian

“Ada is one of those people who can recognize all the ways we inflict pain on one another, not to mention our planet, without getting consumed by it. She writes in that space between grief and joy."—NPR

“In her sixth collection of poetry, The Hurting Kind, Ada Limón seeks to find the intimate connections between the seemingly disparate in the everyday: humans and the natural world, the living and the dead, the intellectual and the spiritual. The collection’s title is apt—it is a testament to the innate power of feeling, whether grief, rage, or tenderness. For Limón, the current Poet Laureate of the United States, who declares herself ‘too sensitive, a weeper . . . the hurting kind,’ even the seemingly banal facets of our existence deserve not only observation, but also empathy and amazement.”—TIME Magazine

“Exquisite … A powerful example of how to carry the things that define us without being broken by them.”—Washington Post

“All of Limón’s books have found a home on my bookshelf, each volume a heartfelt reckoning of what it is to be alive. In her collections, I find a grace that demonstrates her versatility and wisdom as well as a ‘surrendering.’ She explains that the central question of her work is, ‘How do we live in the world?’ Yet she’s a poet as comfortable with questions as with answers.”—Guernica

“[Ada Limón] is one of my all-time favorite writers, someone whose work I return to again and again for solace, inspiration, and truth.”—The Atlantic