On Call Us What We Carry

I’m not sure everything here is poetry, but the writing is good, and if I’m honest I was pleasantly surprised. I fully understand why Gorman was named US Youth Poet Laureate. The work is full of inventive making; much of it repurposes old material to new ends, and I’m entirely for it. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

It’s striking to reflect on Covid and Black Lives Matter alongside her. Covid had somehow become a blank spot for me — it consumed me, and most of the world, for years, and yet I’d managed to forget it entirely until these poems pulled it back to the surface. That’s how I now understand the Spanish Flu being forgotten too: the period was traumatic enough that we blot it out. I didn’t lose anyone I knew to the disease, but the isolation was a killer. Black Lives Matter, meanwhile, is as necessary now as it has ever been.