(Poetry Anthology, 2024)
By Claire Thomspon
For the anthology “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World,” current U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón commissioned 52 poets to write original pieces that engage in some way with nature. The diverse voices in this collection blow the genre wide open, writing of rabbitbrush and a “rain veil making a bride out of the mountain,” yes, but also of shooting saguaros and border crossings, of witches’ covens, lions on Instagram, dogs in the park, Flatbush, the Lahaina fires. If poems are songs, this book is a playlist for the kind of picnic or bonfire party where you laugh, dance, grieve, and go deep with friends and strangers alike.
On my last camping trip of the fall, I stretched out in the waning sun and turned this book’s pages. Before long, I was inspired to pull out my notebook and scribble some poems of my own. Limón knows that the natural world and creativity are meant to go together. For one of her projects as poet laureate, called “You Are Here: Poetry in Parks,” Limón selected seven poems to be engraved on picnic tables in seven national parks around the country, offering visitors a different and deeper way to experience their surroundings. Limón chose Mount Rainier National Park as one location, where a poem by A.R. Ammons called “Uppermost” graces a table outside the visitor center at Paradise.
“Poems are like trees,” Limón writes in the introduction to this anthology. “They let us breathe together. […] Poems can be a place to stop and remember that we too are living.” Whether you open this book in your living room, your local park, or on top of a mountain, let it offer you space to breathe and feel alive—the kind of space we all need more of these days.
