Call Us What We Carry: Poems

by Amanda Gorman

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

The breakout poetry collection by number one New York Times best-selling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman.

Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by number one New York Times best-selling 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 beautiful 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.

 

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Release date: December 7, 2021

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Sample

SHIP’S MANIFEST

Allegedly the worst is behind us.

Still, we crouch before the lip of tomorrow,

Halting like a headless hant in our own house,

Waiting to remember exactly

What it is we’re supposed to be doing.

& what exactly are we supposed to be doing?

Penning a letter to the world as a daughter of it.

We are writing with vanishing meaning,

Our words water dragging down a windshield.

The poet’s diagnosis is that what we have lived

Has already warped itself into a fever dream,

The contours of its shape stripped from the murky mind.

To be accountable we must render an account:

Not what was said, but what was meant.

Not the fact, but what was felt.

What was known, even while unnamed.

Our greatest test will be

Our testimony.

This book is a message in a bottle.

This book is a letter.

This book does not let up.

This book is awake.

This book is a wake.

For what is a record but a reckoning?

The capsule captured?

A repository,

An ark articulated?

& the poet, the preserver

Of ghosts & gains,

Our demons & dreams,

Our haunts & hopes.

Here’s to the preservation

Of a light so terrible.