Review by Joyce Bou Charaa of "Call Us What We Carry" by Amanda Gorman

"What we carry means we survive, it is what survives us. We have survived us." These are Amanda Gorman’s words in her latest poetry collection, Call Us What We Carry. This collection is a truthful message for all who choose to carry on despite the suffering and the aching that we feel nowadays, during the ongoing global pandemic.

In her poems, Gorman reflects deeply on the emotions that everyone felt during the lockdown: the pains of sickness, the loss of the people we love, the fear and anxiety of death, and so on.

Gorman’s poems in this collection focus on all the stages that the world went through in the pandemic: from wearing masks, to the isolation at home, up till the beginning of the recovery from the virus, by seeking hope and joy amid all this misery. Accordingly, each stage has its own sequence of poems, which Gorman wrote to every person surviving this "nightmare," as she calls it.

At the end of this book, Gorman brings us hope out of poems that focus mainly on the new beginnings of tomorrow, and the blessings of the morning. She writes of hope for the future, when life will go back to normal, and when everyone will finally find peace: "For it is in loss that we truly learn to love / In this chaos, we will discover clarity."

Gorman’s words are as power for our souls, that are suffering, while hoping to live for better days ahead. Her poems help us to take a closer look into our feelings of desperation and anticipation, reflecting on one of the most dangerous diseases that has hit the entire world.

About the reviewer

Joyce Bou Charaa is a Lebanese undergraduate English student and a book reviewer, whose articles are published in The Mark Literary Review and at Newpages. She has also studied Journalism for two years, and has an intimate knowledge of Arabic, English, and French languages.