It’s hard to think of a living poet better suited to editing an anthology of poems about the natural world than Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. Though this book doesn’t contain any of her poems, her presence runs through it like a river: her warmth, thoughtfulness, love of the world, willingness to face what’s hard, and belief in the importance of our connections to each other and the world around us. Her introduction made me cry. This is not a “feel-good” book of nature poems. It’s a “feel-big” book of poems about the natural world—which includes us.
You Are Here edited by Ada LimónWith poems from such brilliant poets as Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Carl Phillips, Joy Harjo, Danez Smith, Ruth Awad, and many more, this anthology is one to savor. These poems are about the planet we call home: its rivers and trees, its bugs, its mountains and dirt, its shapes and colors. They are vastly different from each other in just about every way: form, tone, subject matter, style. Some are funny and wry. Some are mysterious and strange. Some rage; others are softly tender. Even what any one poet means by the natural world varies wildly. The poems in this anthology are also very specific. It feels like a collection of love letters to place, and often particular places: specific trees, parks, mountains, desserts, roads, plants. Because of this, there’s an intimacy to the collection that is sometimes lacking in anthologies. More than anything else, though, this is a both/and book, a twinning of love and grief, wonder and despair. Many of these poems are about climate change and climate grief. Many of them are about loving nature, which, of course, also means loving people, loving ourselves. These messy, contradictory feelings sit together inside almost every poem: Here is the dying world, look at how much I love it. I don’t know how much longer I will get to sit beside this beloved tree, so let me tell you about the color of its leaves. I am so sad, I am just a small human doing my small acts of resistance, but look: here is the sky. I read this slowly over a month or so, sitting with the wholeness of the poems, the way they capture the vastness of nature and humanity. Very few of them, if any, are all one thing—a grief poem or a love poem, an ode to beauty or an elegy. I kept turning the pages in awe, waiting to encounter a poem I did not love. I never did. The poems in this book all hold inside them what it means to love this planet in its particulars, which means they also hold what it means to grieve for this planet in its particulars. This is a book to come back to again and again; I know I will, and I hope you will, too. |
The following comes to you from the Editorial Desk.
This week, we’re highlighting a post that had our Managing Editor Vanessa Diaz feeling a type of way. Now, even five years after it was published, Vanessa is still salty about American Dirt. Read on for an excerpt and become an All Access member to unlock the full post.
Picture it: The United States, January 2020. A book with a pretty blue and white cover is making the rounds on the bookish internet. The blue ink forms a beautiful hummingbird motif against a creamy background, a bird associated with the sun god Huitzilopochtli in Aztec mythology. Black barbed wire, at once delicate and menacing, cuts the pattern into a grid resembling an arrangement of Talavera tiles. The package is eye-catching, ostensibly Mexican in feel, and evocative of borders and the migrant experience.
The book tells the story of a bookstore owner in Acapulco, Mexico, who is forced to flee her home when a drug cartel murders everyone in her family except for her young son at a quinceañera. She and the boy are forced to become migrants and embark on a treacherous journey north to the U.S. border, evading the cartel and befriending fellow migrants along the way. The book is being lauded not just as the “it” book of the season but as the immigration story. It gets the Oprah treatment and is praised by everyone from Salma Hayek to the great Sandra Cisneros, who called it “the great novel of Las Américas.”
It’s been over five years, and this book is still the bane of my existence.
Sign up to become an All Access member for only $6/month and then click here to read the full, unlocked article. Level up your reading life with All Access membership and explore a full library of exclusive bonus content, including must-reads, deep dives, and reading challenge recommendations.
Source : Messy, Contradictory Feelings and a Love Letter to Place
