The Hurting Kind
- May 12, 2024
- 2 min read
★★★★★
Though I wish it were otherwise, I know there is poetry that isn’t made for everyone. Yes, poets, like any other artist, often want the greatest audience possible, but some poets and some poetry—not unlike certain works of fiction, entire genres of music, whole swaths of modern art—are simply not made for mass consumption. They eschew broad appeal because the populous lacks the necessary foundation to approach the artist or the work (a failing, or not, depending on your perspective, of our educational system); or because they inhabit a space outside the mainstream (the mainstream being a generally very narrow stream), their points of view too askew, the issues they address too confrontational or too uncomfortable for most.
There are, no doubt, others, but identifying and dissecting all the reasons isn’t my point. My point is that some artists or their work(s) feel(s) universal, transcending any one person’s or persons' milieu(s), and are made for, if not all time, at least times beyond our time.
Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind is one of those transcendent works. Published in 2022, the same year she became Poet Laureate of the United States, it is a wonderful congruence that those two things should have happened within four months of each other. Because what is our Poet Laureate if not a poet who is meant to speak for all of us, for the human condition, to capture life’s smallest, most intimate, most personal moments and draw universal connections and conclusions, bearing witness to our brief, fragile, myriad, divergent lives in ways that help us see ourselves, see each other, see the world in illuminating and enlightening ways?
I believe that poetry has a unique ability to do this, to reflect onto ourselves and reflect our selves onto others, to bridge the divide between our hearts and our brains, our hurt and our healing, what we want as individuals and what we need as societies. In short: I believe poetry can make us better people. The Hurting Kind is the book—not just the book of poetry—people need today: accessible, honest, full of life and all that life means, abound with presence and attendance and revelations. It is a book for the people, and the people would do well to read it.
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