9th Ave Book Talk: Ada Limón with Matthew Zapruder (SF)

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Join us on Tuesday, May 10th at 7pm PT when Ada Limón celebrate the launch of her latest collection, The Hurting Kind, with Matthew Zapruder at 9th Ave!

Masks and Proof of Vaccination Required

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Praise for The Hurting Kind

“The tender, arresting sixth collection from Limón is an ode to the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that characterizes the natural world . . . Limón’s crystalline language is a feast for the senses, bringing monumental significance to the minuscule and revealing life in every blade of grass.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“In The Hurting Kind, [Limón] touches on the pain of living in the world today (the wounds of the natural world, the pandemic between us), but it is not all sorrows . . . You don’t have to look hard to see the joy and the small celebrations of the things that bind us to one another. The Hurting Kind is a book composed of our connective tissue.”—Literary Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2022”

About The Hurting Kind

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limón.

“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón. “I am the hurting kind.” What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?

With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others’ stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And 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. But 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,” writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”

About Ada Limón

Ada Limón is the author of The Hurting Kind, as well as five 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, and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limón is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review, among others. She is the new host of American Public Media’s weekday poetry podcast The Slowdown. Born and raised in California, she now lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

About Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Sun Bear (Copper Canyon), as well as Why Poetry, a book of prose, from Ecco Press/Harper Collins (2017). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, and a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences. His poetry has been adapted and performed at Carnegie Hall by Composer Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider, and was the libretto for Vespers for a New Dark Age, a piece by composer Missy Mazzoli. In 2000, he co-founded Verse Press, and is now editor at large at Wave Books. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is an Associate Professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.

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