Call Us What We Carry

In this collection, Amanda Gorman documents the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic and American history. She uses erasure poetry, archival excerpts from the 1918 flu, and visual lyricism to examine collective grief and the isolation of quarantine. The poems investigate how language functions during a national crisis, referencing scientific terminology and government documents to trace the impact of systemic inequality. Gorman focuses on the concept of human memory as a vessel, framing the act of survival as a communal responsibility shaped by persistent racial and social tensions.

Readers interested in contemporary sociopolitical commentary and structural experimentation will find a historical record of the early 2020s. Those who study how poetry interacts with public discourse use this volume to understand the relationship between private loss and national identity. The reader finishes the collection with a framework for interpreting recent trauma through a lens of civic participation. It provides a specific vocabulary for categorizing the anxieties of a global health emergency while identifying the cultural artifacts that define the current American era.