The world does not have enough good poems with woodchucks, so I was happy to find a vivid one on the first page of The Hurting Kind. She appears as …
a liquidity
moving, all muscle and bristle: a groundhog
slippery and waddle-thieving my tomatoes, still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches, taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight?
Despite the speaker’s plaintive reaction, “delight” runs through these phrases, in both the accuracy and playfulness of description. “Muscle and bristle” sonically relate the animal’s two most salient characteristics. and “waddle-thieving” makes the inflected verb sound as leisurely as an afternoon picnic, with time for one to imagine what the green tomatoes would taste like, “watery bites” that lead to the “delight” often absent from human life.
Limón then turns to a situation distinctive to people, and familiar to writers — a letter out appearing of nowhere:
A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog more closely and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.
Initially this poem seems to express a well-known contrast: unconscious nonhuman “pleasure” versus the “suffering” that comes with being human, a member of a species not only aware of but interested in discussing its suffering. But the last sentence, which ends the first poem and introduces the rest of the book, might not be just contrastive: another way of reading it is to recognize not only the woodchuck but the speaker’s “she” as simultaneously “funny” and “earnest.” Both adjectives are apt for much of The Hurting Kind, a collection of poems entangled with pervasive sorrow.
The Hurting Kind is Limón’s sixth book in just over 15 years. First were Lucky Wreck (2006) and This Big Fake World (also 2006), then Sharks in the Rivers (2010), Bright Dead Things (2015), and The Carrying (2018), which was awarded the National Book Critics Circle poetry prize. From her earliest collections, but increasingly in the most recent four, Limón speculates about how one holds multiple kinds of suffering — that of a close family member, of a stranger, of the whole nonhuman world — in one’s head at once. And as the groundhog poem suggests, she also asks: within that pain, what do you do with moments of happiness?
The Hurting Kind takes up the aftermath of profound loss, and envisions emerging losses that are starting to accumulate. Amid the many-layered sadness of middle age, the speaker sees herself as one of those “with the bag mouths // yawping in the blank / space where our joy // once lived.” She remembers earlier places, interests, and attachments as existing in a time when she had “so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean.” Now she has come to assume that a phone ringing at night is bad news. While she “loved fireworks” when younger, she now dreads “the air askew with booms,” having “become more dog. More senses, shake, and nerve.”
Amid the gradual ravages of time, as if from an impulse to preserve what can be preserved, many of these poems keep looking to family members, and the past. The title poem, for example, begins just after the death of a maternal grandfather. As daughter and mother prepare for the funeral and drive to the cemetery, each bit of speech is italicized, as if to suggest the way these words will be recalled much later — even the mundane commands of a voice navigation device, and the place-names at odds with the actual suburban landscape:
You can’t sum it up, my mother says as we are driving,
and the electronic voice says, Turn left onto Wildwood Canyon Road,
so I turn left, happy for the instructions.
Because one can’t sum up the complexities of a life, Limón gathers fragments. She describes the grandfather’s care for a kingsnake, and how he spoke of his childhood horse “with such a tenderness it / rubbed the bones in my ribs all wrong.” The person returned to most often over the last four collections is a stepmother. One poem in Bright Dead Things wonders about the urge to keep thinking about her illness and death, since dying isn’t something for which someone “wants to be remembered”: “why do I remember hers / and remember hers?” Taken together, some of these elegies are a record of death as seen from the perspective of someone very close to it, and to the trauma and guilt and effort that caregiving entails. But they also commemorate the life: The Hurting Kind includes a poem about the stepmother’s “last-ditch defiant swim” in the ocean, where she made eye contact with the “enormous reckoning eye of an unknown fish” and was, briefly, “no one’s mother, and no one’s wife, / but you in your original skin.”
Limón’s attention to people as their own independent selves also informs the poems about older relatives, in how they encompass not just the speaker’s childhood memories of them, but the relatives’ own memories. The structure of The Hurting Kind underscores the ways that memories of a few family members and friends, dead and still living, are permanent parts of one’s mental landscape. The book is organized by the four seasons, beginning with spring and ending with winter. Over each section, the natural world does change — in the first section, trees are budding and birds nesting — but the focus on people is persistent amid these cycles.
The natural world itself is another recursive subject, with joyful and distressing implications. As with Limón’s previous work, if you observe and delight in nonhuman life, you start observing what nonhuman life endures, largely at the hands of humans. Some poems suggest that humans are “the hurting kind” not only because they can suffer hurt themselves: they can hurt other beings gratuitously. They are creatures who unthinkingly break eggs to see what’s inside, test their dogs’ loyalty, fish without hunger, let spider plants dry up, and hurt other humans. There are also sorrows that have no explanation, as when the speaker finds a dead hatchling of unknown species, “too embryonic, too see-through and wee,” with a “nearly clear body.” The speaker “plant[s]” the bird without much ceremony under a bird feeder:
Seems like a good place for a close-eyed
thing, forever close-eyed, under a green plant
in the ground, under the feast up above.
The speaker senses similarities between herself and this tiny, days-old, unidentifiable bird, and spells it out: “Between / the ground and the feast is where I live now.” That sense of betweenness appears again and again in The Hurting Kind — but it does so via a range of tones, and the dominant one is happier: to adequately describe the feel of this book, one needs to acknowledge not only the potential bitterness in seeing a burnt tree as “half alive to the brightening sky, / half dead already,” but also the defiantly scruffy squirrel “almost dead // that is, in fact, not / dead at all.” For each poem that registers heartache for the nonhuman world, there is one of elation at seeing another life form going about its business. Other species appear on almost every page: a belted kingfisher and a magnificent frigate bird, a mountain lion seen through a night camera, a domestic cat seen as “an ancient cat and prickly.” (That construction might remind you of “funny creature and earnest”: Limón likes to connect two adjectives with “and” rather than joining them by commas. It is if she wants to give each adjective its independence, and to capture the feel of having lighted on the second adjective a second later, int order to get at the actual mixture of things that the animal is. That sense of spontaneity, of speech that might have originated in actually, suddenly, celebrating an animal aloud, is central to her poems.)
When the speaker exclaims, “look, I have already witnessed something other than my / slipping face in the fogged mirror,” it’s because she’s seen an American kestrel — a fairly common bird but still one with power to startle, to stop one from thinking about one’s self. Trees, flowers, and weeds also have this powerful influence. Limón is a nature poet in a nearly all-embracing sense of the word, like Ross Gay; for her, “nature” includes introduced species, or plants growing in unpropitious places: “dearest purple spiderwort in the ditch’s mud, how did you do it?”
I want to end by emphasizing both the funniness and the earnestness audible in these encounters, enhanced by the formal possibilities of surprising line breaks, traces of set rhythms, and unlooked-for internal rhymes. In “It’s the Season I Often Mistake,” the pleasure of noticing other worlds takes the form of a title that continues into the first line: “Birds for leaves, and leaves for birds.” That chaotic intermingling echoes the visual confusion itself, the way leaves and birds really can be confused for each other. As Limón notices and shows us, mulberry leaves can look like goldfinches, “crabapple / ovates” turn into song sparrows, and field sparrows, flying up into a hackberry, are momentarily “leaves / reattaching themselves to the tree / like a strong spell for reversal.”
[Published by Milkweed Editions on May 10, 2022, 120 pages, $22.00 hardcover]