Call Us What We Carry By Amanda Gorman

Thoughts and messages about experience, struggle, and history are embodied throughout Amanda Gorman’s collection of poems titled Call Us What We Carry, composed in 2021. Written during such a pivotal time in history due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gorman’s poems highlight the extreme emotions and compelling experiences society faced as a whole during this period of such bleak isolation. The stories translated through her words transport us back to that time of quarantine and evoke a reflection on that era of isolation. Call Us What We Carry, Gorman’s lyrical collection of poetry consists of a multitude of pieces including poems titled Essex I and Essex II. Grief is the subject that establishes the intertextuality of these two works, although

This tragedy ultimately resulted in the survival of only eight of the twenty crewmen, who had to resort to the cannibalism of their other crewmates for survival before their rescue months later. Gorman utilizes this horrific story throughout Essex I to portray a drastic depiction of grief by stating, “Were we any different, any less rent, rapt, & lost. Loss is undecipherable. Can you even be rescued if you’ve been ruined” (Gorman). As the crewmen have been lost at sea and struggling to grasp onto survival, grief overcomes them and they see no end to their torture in sight. Gorman indicates this by questioning if rescue is even possible despite the ruined state the men had been in; hopeless and soulless. With no food or water, they had been forced to resort to cannibalism for their survival, slowly depleting the amount of living crewmen as time slowly went on. They felt grief for the lives of their comrades and even their own lives, as they believed they were going to face their own demise out at sea. Gorman describes loss as undecipherable, accentuating the complex emotion of grief and how difficult it is to understand and encounter for the human mind. Her language generates the sense that humans almost have little capacity to grapple with the emotion of grief and that it is extremely compelling and gripping. Her exemplification of Essex I represents the reality of grief to a small extent, as this experience of cannibalism, death, and tragedy is one that is unnavigable and