Book Review: Call Us What We Carry
Ella Zubec /  Wed, 16 Feb 2022


In December of 2021, the United States’s first ever National Youth Poet Laureate, Amanda Gorman, released her poetry collection titled Call Us What We Carry. The book includes personal reflections on how she weathered COVID-19, like the poem “School’s Out,” which puts a powerful spin on losing your graduation, or “Coda in Code” which gives readers a feel for what it is like to try and comprehend the world with an auditory processing disorder. Additionally, she described the pandemic’s impact on marginalized communities across the globe. Ms. Gorman does a great job of touching on so many key impacts of the coronavirus, and how it is so closely intertwined with the systemic racism that has always been present in our world. She not only spoke for her community, as a Black American, but as well for Indigenous and Asian communities. The book does a full circle and finishes with her poem “The Hill We Climb,” a piece that kick started her career and made her famous. Ms. Gorman is one of the many amazing Black artists whom our generation is blessed with; she has always used her voice to promote justice, and her growing fame to give back. I encourage you all to take a moment and read Call Us What We Carry.



Sources: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Amanda-Gorman, https://poets.org/poet/amanda-gorman