To me, it feels like a privilege to read Amanda Gordon’s poetry – to hear her unique voice and inhabit her language and her world. As our youngest-ever U.S. Poet Laureate, she explores the current ethos of our shared pandemic isolation, uncertainty, and grief, and the ever-raw, intergenerational trauma of racism. Her poems arise from a deep well of knowledge and wisdom, seemingly far beyond her years. And yet, these days it is often the youth who are wisest. Remembering my own coming-of-age in the 60s, I see how naïve we were, and over-confident. Dear fellow reader, give yourself a gift. Read this remarkable book of poems, and you will look, as if from new eyes, out on the world.
Review by Julie Kabat