Call Us What We Carry
“Take tragedy, write a book.” Amanda Gorman’s debut collection, Call Us What We Carry, explores more than a century’s worth of epidemics, including the Great Influenza of 1918, AIDS, and the often overlooked effects of climate change and racism as their own species of plagues. At its best, poignant images blend with satisfying sounds to help us hear her warnings, showing us “sugar-crumbling / glaciers" and "crows chewing / on their own soured song.” In “Alarum,” we learn “Extinction is a chorus / of quiet punching / that / same note.”
Gorman’s ambitious project flits across experimental forms, utilizing erasure and leaning heavily on artifact and research, aptly quoting from M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, among other works. The collection includes concrete poems, such as “Essex I,” which is shaped like a whale and arranged in landscape orientation, forcing us to turn our heads or turn the book as we consider “[h]ow much more wreck do we have / within us”? Another poem, “Libations” borrows its diamond shape from Layli Long Soldier’s “Obligations 2” and invites the reader to approach the text from a range of vantage points.
As a translator, I can’t help but feel some poems depend too heavily on alliteration and English etymology and wonder what meaning might remain once English-based wordplay is stripped away. Rather than evolving or developing an idea across the collection, some repetitions feel like treading water: “To tell the truth, then, is to risk / being remembered by its fiction,” says the speaker in “Vale of the Shadow of Death,” and in “Pan”: “to tell the mistranslation, then, is to risk being remembered by its fiction.”
Despite these repetitions, Call Us What We Carry is built for multiple voyages and its collaged construction rewards rereading. I’m excited by the chorus of voices Gorman has chosen to combine here, a range of influences spanning great distances from Rhianna to Rilke, with a reference to the Roman playwright Terence via Maya Angelou. Above all else, what resonates with me is Gorman’s insistence that “[t]his book, like a ship, is meant to be lived in.”