Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman
Poems
Title: Call Us What We Carry
Author: Amanda Gorman
Publisher: Viking Books
Publication Year: 2021
ISBN: 9780593465066
Rating: 5 stars
Like me, many people learned who Amanda Gorman was as they cried through her inaugural poem. With the publication of that poem in book form, followed by the publication of this poetry collection shortly after, and her children’s book Change Sings, Gorman took the poetry world by storm. And let me tell you, the hype is justified. As I read through this collection of poems (which was extremely hefty for a poetry book), I was constantly surprised and blown away by Gorman’s mind and her writing ability.
This collection focuses on the themes of pandemics (both COVID-19 and the Spanish Flu pandemic), ships (relationships, the Essex disaster, and slave ships), and the marginalization of black people in America (slavery, the Great Migration, police violence against black people, and the BLM movement). While these themes all seem separate and different, Gorman weaves them together seamlessly. She experiments with several forms of poem too from erasure to calligrams to text messages to free verse. I think working in so many extremely different forms is very ambitious especially for such a young poet, but she pulls them all off stunningly. Out of the over 200 pages of poetry in this collection, there was only one poem I didn’t like, and that was because it had a very simple ABAB AABB AABB ABAB rhyme scheme. I personally don’t like poetry with a simple rhyme scheme—it always feels like Dr. Seuss to me, but even that poem is done well, it just isn’t to my taste.
Gorman is magic with language. She uses repetition of parts of words to turn meaning on its head. In “Ship’s Manifest” the first poem in the collection, she writes:
"To be accountable we must render an account:... Our greatest test will be Our testimony... This book is awake. This book is a wake."
Opening the book this way sets the tone for the rest of the collection. This book is rendering an account and is a testimony of Gorman’s experience as a young black woman in the US. Much of that testimony will be relatable for anyone who has lived in the US since 2020. This book is both awake in the sense that it is aware of its time and surroundings, but also a wake in that it morns those lost to slavery, history, the Spanish Flu, and COVID. In “The Surveyed: Report on Migration of Roes” she says:
"Grief, like glass, can be both a mirror & a window, enabling us to look both in & out, then & now & how. In other words, we become a window pain."
This passage is poignant because this poem is an erasure poem based on interview answers of African Americans who moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. Gorman fictionalizes the story, but uses excerpts from the real interviews. She doesn’t provide the context until the end of the poem, which then casts the poem into new light and almost demands a second reading. I like this passage because of the word play with “window pain” and “window pane” to hearken back to the “Grief, like glass” metaphor at the beginning of the line.
This passage is also a great example of Gorman’s expert use of assonance and alliteration in her work. This is an example of assonance (the repetition of the “o” sound in both, window, out, now, how), but alliteration can be seen in this passage from “Cut”:
"Some days, we just need a place Where we can bleed in peace. Our only word for this is Poem."
The repetitive “p” sound in “place,” “peace,” and “poem” emphasize the importance of those three words, which are the crux of this passage. I also liked the alliteration and assonance in this excerpt from “Vale of the Shadow of Death or Extra! Extra! Read All About It!” (the use of “vale” in this poem refers to the word “vale” as we know it in English but also “vale” in Spanish meaning “ok” or “understood”):
"The oppressor will always say the oppressed want their overcrowded cage, cozy & comforting as it is; the master will claim that the slaves' chains were understood, good, all right, okay-- that is to say, not chains at all. A racial insult renders us a mammal, albeit less free. In short, a slur is a sound that beasts us."
Assonance and alliteration are not uncommon or unique in poetry, but later in the book, Gorman states that she has an auditory processing disorder. Because sound is so much a part of her poetry and the poems almost beg to be read aloud, it makes me curious about how her auditory processing disorder impacts her poetry. Some of her erasure poems come from ads and she based them off of her auditory processing disorder, but I’d be interested to see how the two can go hand in hand.
Finally, I loved the way Gorman takes the trite or mundane and makes it new and emotionally impactful. In “At First,” a poem formatted to look like a text exchange, Gorman challenges the cliché of telling children to leave a mark on the world:
"We teach children: Leave a mark on the world. What leads a man to shoot up Souls but the desire to mark Up the globe? To scar it & thus make it his. His intention to be remembered, Even if for a ragged wreckage. Kids, unmark this place. Leave it nothing Like the one we left behind."
I felt this passage viscerally when I read it and it made me think long and hard about the different types of marks people do leave on the world and whether or not we might not be better off being judicious about the marks we make. In the poem “What We Did in the Time Being,” which is about the COVID quarantine in 2020, she writes:
"Felt ourselves Zoombies, Faces trapped in a prison of a prism. The petty zoo[m] as it were."
I love the alliteration with “prison,” “prism,” and “petty,” and I love the word play with “Zoombies” and “petty zoo[m].” I hadn’t ever thought of it that way before, but it’s the perfect image to encapsulate the time.
Emily Dickinson said, “If I read a book and…I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” That is how I often feel when I read my favorite poet, Anne Carson. Gorman includes several quotes from Carson in this work and I can definitely see parallels between the two poets in their mastery of language. I for sure felt like the top of my head was taken off reading this collection and I could geek out about it forever. I truly think Gorman is a genius and cannot recommend this collection enough.