Amanda Gorman

The breakout poetry collection by Sunday Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman 'This is more than protest. It's a promise.' Including 'The Hill We Climb,' the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, this luminous poetry collection by Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, these seventy poems shine a light on a moment of reckoning and reveal that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future. Praise for 'The Hill We Climb': 'I was profoundly moved... The power of your words blew me away' Michelle Obama, TIME 'I was thrilled' Hillary Clinton 'She spoke truth to power and embodied clear-eyed hope to a weary nation. She revealed us to ourselves' Lin-Manuel Miranda, TIME

From the presidential inaugural poet

Call Us What We Carry

Anneliese Villanueva 

Madi Van Houten

Celine

We became paid professionals of pain, Specialists in suffering, Aces of the ache, Masters of the moan.

To try is to take a stab, To take a shot. We want to find who made us A slaughterhouse, A rhetoric that works in red. We teach children: Leave a mark on the world. What leads a man to shoot up Souls but the desire to mark

Anxiety is a living body. Poised beside us like a shadow. It is the last creature standing, The only beast who loves us Enough to stay.

Since the world is round., There is no way to walk away From cach other, for even then We are coming back together.

What we carry mcans we survive, It is what survives us.

It's not what was donc that will haunt us, But what was withheld, What was kept out & kept away. The hand clenched tightly With every black blow. We cannot fathom all these phantoms. But do not fear our ghosts. Learn from them.

Do not ask us who we are. The hardest part of griet Is giving it a name.

Call Us What We Carry quotes

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