You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

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Published in associationwith the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by fifty of our most celebrated contemporary writers.

For many years, nature poetry has evoked images of Romantic poets standing on mountain tops. But our poetic landscape has changed dramatically, and so has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limn, this book challenges what we think we know about nature poetry, illuminating the myriad ways our landscapesboth literal and literaryare changing.

You Are Here Each poem engages with its authors local landscapebe it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stopoffering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.

Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what nature and poetry are today, inviting readers to experience both anew.

Reviews

Praise for The Hurting Kind

So grateful am I for Limns powerfully observant eye. There are many wonderful poems here and a handful of genuine masterpieces. . . . The Hurting Kind is packed with quiet celebrations of the quotidian. . . . Limn forces herself to confront, again and again in these poems, natures unwillingness to yield its secretsits one of her primary subjects. The seemingly abundant wisdom of the natural world is really a vision of her own searching reflection. . . . Limn is great company in the presence of the inchoate, able and willing to stand with her readers before the frightening mysteries and hopeful uncertainties of the everyday."New York Times Book Review

I can always rely on an Ada Limn poem to give me hope, but Limns poems dont give us the kind of facile Hallmark hope; rather, her hope is hard-earned, even laced with grief or happiness . . . Limn 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. Limn gives us two brains in her poems too, revealing new ways to view the world.Victoria Chang, New York Times Magazine

"In her sixth collection of poetry, The Hurting Kind, Ada Limn 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 collections title is aptit is a testament to the innate power of feeling, whether grief, rage, or tenderness. For Limn, 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, 100 Must Read Books of 2022

"Limns poems are unique for the deep attention they pay to both the worlds wounds and its redemptive beauty. In otherwise dark times, they have the power to open us up to the wonder and awe that the world still inspires."The Ezra Klein Show

"[Ada Limn] is one of my all-time favorite writers, someone whose work I return to again and again for solace, inspiration, and truth."Nicole Chung, The Atlantic

"For poet Ada Limn, evidence of poetry is everywhere. It connects big ideaslike fear, isolation, even deathwith little detailslike field sparrows, a box of matches, or 'the body moving / freely.' The award-winning poet's sixth and latest collection, The Hurting Kind, is a testament to the power of such sensitivity . . . The power of attention, Limn conveys, is in finding out just how an individual's experience might fit into the collective experience. But in The Hurting Kind Limn takes her method even further to ask: Isn't wonder enough . . . Above all, The Hurting Kind asks for our attention to stay tender. To know that the world is here to both guide us and lead us astray. Toward the end of the long poem, Limn writes: 'I will not stop this reporting of attachments. / There is evidence everywhere.' So don't stop looking. Just be open to what you may find. And know that the world is watching you, too."NPR

The Hurting Kind is a book of living language and nowhere more than in the way words animate the poems . . . Throughout [Limns] work, the language is direct and unadorned while also playful and full of unexpected turns. Something similar is true of The Hurting Kind, which is a quieter book but no less fierce for being so. . . . When Limn exclaims, in the last line of the poem and the collection, I am asking you to touch me, she is writing out of the darkness of the pandemic, but she is also addressing something more universal and profound. What are words worth if they cant help to bridge the gaps between us Its a question many of us are asking as we try to navigate this fallen world.David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"Ada Limn is a bright light in a dark time. Her keen attention to the natural world is only matched by her incredible emotional honesty.... Considering the arc from youthful vibrancy to protective camouflage, Limn tracks the beauty of wisdom as we age. Reconciling the all too human matter of our lives within the spectacle of nature, Limn archives a suspended grace.... The Hurting Kind ... explor[es] the restorative connections between human life and the natural world. The poems reckon with vulnerability and grief in a startling and broken world."Vanity Fair

Again and again in this poetry collection, her sixth, Limn confronts natures unwillingness to yield its secretsits one of her primary subjects. The seemingly abundant wisdom of the natural world is really a vision of her own searching reflection. 'Limn looks out her window, walks around her yard, and, like Emily Dickinson, trips over infinities,' our reviewer wrote.New York Times, "100 Notable Books of 2022"

"Ada Limns sixth and latest collection is a testament to the power of sensitivity. As with her previous award-winning books, The Carrying and Bright Dead Things, these poems are acutely aware of the natural world. And Limn has a knack for acknowledging natures little mysteries in order to fully capture its history and abundance. For her, evidence of poetry is everywhere. She connects big ideasfear, isolation, even deathwith little details, like field sparrows, a box of matches or the body moving / freely. Above all, The Hurting Kind asks for our attention to stay tender."Jeevika Verma, NPR, Books We Love

In Limns newest collection, she writes poems suffused with nostalgia, longing, and grief, divided up by the seasons, writing of nurturing seeds, steadfast love, grief, burial. She writes of joyful wonder and powerful grief. Of getting high and staring up at cherry trees, of earning a cats trust, of seeing the neighbors get a tree cut down, all tangled up in stories of emotionally manipulative relationships and family discoveries and what real love looks like. Mainly, she writes about what its like to be the hurting kind of persona tender kind of person, sensitive to the pain she sees and the small joys she glimpses out in the world, soft, vulnerable, painfully empathetic. Its the kind of person I am, and I saw myself so deeply in these poems. Limns hit it out of the park once again.BookRiot, Best Books of the Year

Its comforting, amid a stack of thick novels and all the latest cookbooks, to keep a book of short poems to dip into like scripture. This is the latest from the open-hearted Kentucky-based poet Ada Limn, who writes earnestly about love, her Mexican American family, and the wildness of memory. CJ Lotz, Garden & Gun, Best Southern Books of 2022

Limn responds in her poetry to what she identifies as an ecological imperative to re-describe our relationship to nature in a manner that isnt merely instrumental. The moving personal dramas that her poems detail can never be separated from the landscape in which they occur . . . Consequently, her poetry, which can feel so intimate and self-revealing, is almost constantly political at the same time . . . There are endless things to say about the articulate, complex emotional resonance of the poems in this book. Still, what Limn says about a life is true as well for her book: You cant sum it up.Forrest Gander, Brooklyn Rail

These poems home in on how grief makes us human . . . [Limn] reminds readers that we are nothing without connection. If you havent read poetry in a while, this volume might be what you need to reconnect with the form.Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times

Like Sharon Olds and Pablo Neruda, the poets she most resembles, and clearly learned from, Limn is a lover. She writes like a hyperporous lover of the world . . . One of the greatest challenges of our time is to see the living world as having value beyond us. To acknowledge the damage done. What if, Limn appears to be asking in this remarkable book, the best we have made, the finest instrument we know, is our language of loveJohn Freeman, Alta Journal

Once again, Ada Limn has written a book I dont want to put down. I find the intensity of her honest interior and environmental explorations spellbinding . . . I see the world in these poems. It may cut me up, but it will also give me back to myself again.Camille Dungy, Orion

In one of Ada Limns early poems, she asks, Shouldnt we make fire out of everyday things For the past 16 years, thats exactly what shes done. [She is] fearlessly confessional and technically brilliant.Washington Post

Brilliant . . . Throughout is the trademark wonder, and blown-out perceptivity, underscoring Limns clarion melancholy.San Francisco Chronicle

[A] shimmering new collection of poems . . . The matter of aliveness is at the very core of The Hurting Kind, a collection that feels as though its right on time, with verse that hews close-to-the-bone and is uncommonly relatable in its unflinching, but deeply compassionate, treatment of human pain. Rather than working to dodge the hurt, to make meaning of it so that it might be transmuted from wound into scar, The Hurting Kind is an invitation to sink into the ache, pressing willingly on the bruises wrought by being a body in time, being a body alive . . . The Hurting Kind is a work of deep humanity, of recognizing all thats asked of us . . . It is mercy.Literary Hub

"This collection is a testament to survival, to the will to go on and to the way the world goes on without us. . . . Reading these poems brings the world into such focus that you cant help but feel more tethered to it, receptive to

Author Bio

Ada Limnis the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate as well as the author ofThe Hurting Kindandfive other collections of poems. These include, most recently,The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, andBright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limn is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in theNew Yorker, theNew York Times,andAmerican Poetry Review, among others.Born and raised in California, she now lives in Lexington, Kentucky.