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Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman

Source: Gift
Hardcover, 240 pgs.
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Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman, which was the August read-a-long, is the first poetry collection by the youngest poet laureate to read at a presidential inauguration. Her poems read much like a spoken word poet would recite them. She plays a lot with poetic form, crafting lines into images of whales and masks, and placing poignant lines on the stripes of the American flag. Some of these image-focused poems work well, but others just seem to fall flat.

From "Cut" (pg.26-27)

Disease is physiological death,
Loneliness is a social one,
Where the old We collapses like a lung.
From "War: What, Is It Good? (pg. 118-124)

War, like a whale, is all consuming-
Everything fits into its mesh mouth.
Like a whale, a virus can wolf
Down the globe whole.
The bullet is a beast, as are we.
Our invisible battles
Are the hardest ones to win.

***

The first step in warfare & pandemics is the same:
Isolation, to rupture the channels of communication of
virus/violence."
Later in that poem on mask vs. no mask (pg. 144)

Why it's so perturbing for privileged groups to follow
restrictions of place & personhood.
Doing so means for once wearing the chains their power
has shackled on the rest of us.

Gorman tackles a lot of issues in this collection from slavery and racism to the COVID pandemic and its parallels with the 1918 Spanish flu. Water imagery and references to the slave ships travel throughout the collection, connecting the struggles together into the anchor that many still carry.

There is a lot of struggle and darkness in these poems, but she answers the call of how to move on with love, empathy, and connection. Gorman reminds us that there is hope for change, and that we can make those choices. We are not all that we carry with us.

From "School's Out" (pg. 17-8)

Their feet stomp at our life.
There is power in being robbed
& still choosing to dance.

Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman is strongest when it is passionate and honest, when the poems don’t rely too heavily on physical images or erasure to create declarative poems. Her honesty shines brightest in her youthful passion and I am eager to see more from this poet.

RATING: Tercet

This was our August read-a-long selection for the 2022 Poetry Reading Challenge. You can find those discussions below:

About the Poet:

Amanda Gorman is the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, as well as an award-winning writer and cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she studied Sociology. She has written for the New York Times and has three books forthcoming with Penguin Random House.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, she began writing at only a few years of age. Now her words have won her invitations to the Obama White House and to perform for Lin-Manuel Miranda, Al Gore, Secretary Hillary Clinton, Malala Yousafzai, and others. Amanda has performed multiple commissioned poems for CBS This Morning and she has spoken at events and venues across the country, including the Library of Congress and Lincoln Center. She has received a Genius Grant from OZY Media, as well as recognition from Scholastic Inc., YoungArts, the Glamour magazine College Women of the Year Awards, and the Webby Awards. She has written for the New York Times newsletter The Edit and penned the manifesto for Nike’s 2020 Black History Month campaign. In 2017, Amanda Gorman was appointed the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate by Urban Word – a program that supports Youth Poets Laureate in more than 60 cities, regions and states nationally. She is the recipient of the Poets & Writers Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, and is the youngest board member of 826 National, the largest youth writing network in the United States.

Final Week: Amanda Gorman’s Call Us What We Carry Read-a-Long

For this last week, we read the final sections of the collection:Fury & Faith and Resolution.

Here are a few questions to get us started:

  1. In Fury & Faith, Gorman again takes the poetic form and upends it, placing it onto the stripes of the American flag. What are your thoughts on this use of poetic lines?
  2. Explore your reactions to the poems in this first of the last two sections. What are some of the things that stuck out to you?
  3. In the Resolution section, what do you think her main point is about resolution?

I’ll be monitoring the comments and replying throughout the weekend. Can’t wait to see what everyone thinks.

Check out the previous discussions below:

Thank you to everyone who participated or just read along with us. I hope you enjoyed the book, and I’d love to hear what you thought overall.

Week Three: Amanda Gorman’s Call Us What We Carry Read-a-Long

For this 3rd week, we read the Atonement section.

Here are a few questions to get us started:

1. What was your favorite poem in this section?

2. Erasure poems modify current text to create something new or highlight a particular theme. What impact does this form have on these poems?

3. Gorman offers a great deal of background to these found poems in footnotes and elsewhere, how did or did it not affect your reading of the poems?

I’ll be monitoring the comments and replying throughout the weekend. Can’t wait to see what everyone thinks.

Week Two: Amanda Gorman’s Call Us What We Carry Read-a-Long

For this 2nd week, we read the 3rd and 4th sections: Earth Eyes and Memoria.

Here are a few questions to get us started:

  • In Earth Eyes, what do you see are the main themes and how do they relate to the collection’s title, Call Us What We Carry?
  • Gorman has a lot of visual forms for her poems, how do they impact your enjoyment of the poems?
  • In Memoria, what do you think Gorman is saying about memory and the act of remembering?
  • What are some of your favorite lines or poems in these two sections?

I’ll be monitoring the comments and replying throughout the weekend. Can’t wait to see what everyone thinks.

Week One: Amanda Gorman’s Call Us What We Carry Read-a-Long

For this first week, we read the first two sections: Requiem and What a Piece of Wreck is Man

I wanted to start the discussion with a few questions about these two sections.

1. Why do you think “Ship’s Manifest” is the opening poem to the collection and no included in the first section, “Requiem?”

2. Gorman’s first section’s title signals that the poems will be a remembrance of the dead, how well do you think the poems accomplish this task? What was one of your favorites?

3. In “What a Piece of Wreck is Man,” what do you think she’s saying with these poems? Is man irredeemable? Is there more to our failures?

4. What are some of your favorite poems or lines in these two sections?

I’ll be monitoring the comments and replying throughout the weekend. Can’t wait to see what everyone thinks.

Results & Schedule: Poetry Read-a-Long for August

The poll results are in! The August Read-a-Long will be for:

Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman:

Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, Amanda Gorman’s remarkable new collection reveals an energizing and unforgettable voice in American poetry. Call Us What We Carry is Gorman at her finest. Including “The Hill We Climb,” the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, and bursting with musical language and exploring themes of identity, grief, and memory, this lyric of hope and healing captures an important moment in our country’s consciousness while being utterly timeless.

Reading poetry can be a solitary venture. I’d like us to read and talk about Gorman’s book on a weekly schedule.

For every Friday in August, I will post my initial thoughts about the given section and leave the comments open for you to either share your favorite poems, pose questions about the poems, or add to the discussion.

Here’s the read-a-long schedule for August (I hope you’ll join and encourage others to do so):

  • First Discussion Post for sections Requiem and What a Piece of Wreck is Man: Aug. 5
  • Second Discussion Post for sections Earth Eyes and Memoria: Aug. 12
  • Third Discussion Post for section Atonement: Aug. 19
  • Final Discussion Post for sections Fury & Faith and Resolution: Aug. 26

If you’ve joined this year’s Poetry Reading Challenge, this can count as your 1 book of poetry you read this year. Join us and have fun! Remember you don’t have to like all the poems.

Mailbox Monday #663

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Velvet, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

This is what we received:

What did you receive?

Mailbox Monday #661

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Velvet, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

This is what we received:

Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman, which was a surprise in the mail.

Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.

the moon won’t be dared by Anne Leigh Parrish for review.

the moon won’t be dared is a poetry collection by award-winning author Anne Leigh Parrish that features artwork by Lydia Selk. In this momentous debut collection, the poet harnesses language to give readers a new vision of nature, the impossible plight of womanhood, love, aging, and beauty. Being a woman in a male-dominated society affords Anne Leigh Parrish the space to witness the world on an uneven keel. Parrish pays tribute to beauty, but also weaves the harsh truths of betrayal and brutality into the filaments holding the collection together.

What did you receive?