Call Us What We Carry: Questions & Answers

1. How does “Call Us” use the human microbiome to redefine identity?

Amanda Gorman’s poem “Call Us” dismantles individualism by revealing that over half of a human body consists of non-human cells. The speaker declares, “We are not me—We are we,” shifting the definition of self from a singular vessel to a community of microbes. The body becomes a boat, a country, a continent, a planet. The title phrase appears as a closing invitation: “Call us / What we carry.” This reframes identity as an ecological and communal reality, not a solitary possession, directly connecting to the book’s larger argument that we are formed by all we bear—biological, historical, and emotional.

2. In “What We Carry,” what does the ark symbolize and how does it connect to childhood memory?

The ark in “What We Carry” is a multifaceted symbol for language itself. Gorman traces its etymology from the Latin arca (“chest”) and links it to Noah’s ark and the Torah ark, both vessels of preservation. She writes, “Language is an ark. / Yes, Language is an art, / An articulate artifact. / Language is a life craft. / Yes, Language is a life raft.” The poem opens with a childhood memory of holding dirt, where children instinctively understand that “even grime is a gift.” This childhood wonder is the foundation: the ark of words preserves the miraculous in the mundane, carrying us beyond disaster. Language is what saves us, not by escaping the world, but by holding it.

3. Why does the speaker in “Who We Gonna Call” insist that we summon our “tender selves” instead of ghosts?

“Who We Gonna Call” opens with an epigraph defining writing as “the preservation of ghosts,” but Gorman rapidly subverts the metaphor. She acknowledges that we rouse ghosts for memory yet fear them. However, she declares, “there are no wraiths but us,” revealing that the true specters are not external spirits but disowned parts of ourselves. The call to “summon our tender selves” is an act of self-reclamation. Rather than seeking answers from the dead or the past as a haunted place, the poem argues that we must confront our own vulnerabilities. By pulling the past “home,” we become “fluent in all things bright,” turning haunting into wholeness.

4. What is the significance of the single word “Protest” in “Selma Epp”?

In “Selma Epp,” a child’s account of the 1918 flu in North Philadelphia, the stark line “Protest” breaks the narrative of communal care and dying. Framed by descriptions of people standing apart, praying, and growing weaker, this isolated word acts as a visual and emotional rupture. It signals a refusal—not necessarily political in an organized sense, but an existential push against the silence of suffering. It mirrors the way grief breaks through document and memory alike. By embedding a child’s voice in an archival retelling, Gorman connects pandemic isolation to the impulse to speak back, linking the poem to the collection’s broader theme of resisting erasure.

5. How does Gorman use Corporal Roy Underwood Plummer’s diary in “The Soldiers (or Plummer)” to explore race, language, and memory?

Gorman combines Plummer’s original WWI diary prose with her own haiku, choosing the concise Japanese form to mirror his “economic use of language.” Plummer, a Black clerk and engineer, served in segregated supply units, and his meticulous handwriting reflects an awareness of being read—a soldier preserving his own record against historical neglect. The haiku’s five-seven-five syllable structure honors his brevity while amplifying his interior world. The chapter’s epigraph from The Odyssey frames Plummer as a truthful witness, and the collaboration between diary and haiku insists that Black soldiers’ experiences are not footnotes but central texts. Language economy becomes a form of dignity and survival.

6. In “The Fellowship,” how does Gorman transform Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s 1918 letter into a demand for “Democracy before war”?

Gorman adapts Wells-Barnett’s letter to President Wilson protesting General Ballou’s Bulletin Number 35, which urged Black soldiers to avoid public places where their race made them unwelcome. The poem’s fragmented, echoing structure blends archival language with Gorman’s lines, emphasizing the contradiction of fighting for democracy abroad while enduring segregation at home. The refrain “Democracy before war” reframes Wells-Barnett’s protest as an ongoing, unresolved demand. The title “The Fellowship” references both the Negro Fellowship League and the wider community of those who insist on equality. By turning a historical letter into a modern poem, Gorman makes the past’s unheeded justice claims urgent again.

7. What does the scribbled note “This girl was buried in the trench” reveal about grief and responsibility in “Donohue Family Ledgers”?

The Donohue family’s burial ledgers during an epidemic become a record of both order and chaos. The poem notes that tidy entries give way to crossed-out lines and scribbled margins, making tragedy “nearly impossible to track.” The anonymous girl, reduced to a single note, becomes a symbol of all who are erased by mass death. The speaker’s declaration, “This girl was our trench. / Where else to put her,” transforms her from a forgotten individual into a shared wound. The family’s responsibility to bury strangers is framed as a moral decency. Gorman insists that communal grief must hold even those history forgets.

8. According to “Surviving,” why is it important that the dead “did not die for us”?

“Surviving” confronts a common consolation: that the lost died for a purpose or for the living. The speaker flatly rejects this: “The gone were/are no threshold, / No stepstone beneath our feet. / Even as they did not die / For us, we shall move for them.” This distinction is ethically crucial. It refuses to romanticize death as a necessary sacrifice, which would erase the tragedy’s full injustice (“It didn’t have to be this way”). Instead, the living choose to move forward in honor of the dead, not because the dead gifted progress, but because the living owe them remembrance and action. This redefines grief as an active debt.

9. What does Gorman mean by “good grief” in the poem of that name?

“Good Grief” redefines trauma etymologically as “piercing” or “turning,” not simply a wound. Gorman argues that feeling anguish confirms we are alive and capable of imagining more than we thought survivable. The phrase “beside ourselves with grief” becomes an expansion: grief places us outside our former selves, granting new perspective. “Good grief” is not pleasant, but it is an anchor rather than a burden, grounding us while clearing space for “exquisite, excruciating enormities to come.” The poem insists that hurt is not the opposite of life but a sign of it, and that what we carry—our grief—both ensures survival and outlasts us.

10. How does “Pre-memory” distinguish collective amnesia from collective remembrance, and why does storytelling matter?

Gorman coins “pre-memory” as the recall of a trauma still unfolding, distinct from Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory. The poem argues that experiencing a crisis already prompts the question: “How will this be told?” The moral fork is between collective amnesia—forgetting, erasing, distorting as we live—and collective remembrance—carrying, truth-telling, sharing. Storytelling transforms unarticulated memory into “artifact, becomes fact, becomes felt again, becomes free.” Without it, grief is a grenade that always detonates. Gorman positions narrative as an ethical act that shapes who we become, not just a record of what happened. Empires rise and fall on memory’s handling.

11. In “Another Nautical,” how does the suffix “-ship” transform words and relationships?

Gorman deconstructs the English suffix “-ship” (from Old English scieppan, “to shape”) to argue that relationships actively form identity. Adding “-ship” to “relation,” “leader,” “kin,” or “hard” creates qualities and conditions that structure human life. The poem then notes the slang verb “to ship,” meaning to imagine a pairing, which turns the suffix into momentum: “Life has taken the suffix -ship, made it a verb.” This is not erasure but expansion, a “culmination” and “growth.” The argument culminates in the assertion that “fellowship is both our nature & our necessity,” and that unity requires no enemy—only love as connection without opposition.

12. What shift occurs in “& So” from despair to hope, and what role does the round world play?

“& So” begins by contrasting the ease of complaining with the difficulty of hoping, then moves through images of a dark girl dreaming despite dread and a smile like an “unshunted sun.” Grief exits gently, like a released breath. The pivotal image is the round earth: “Since the world is round, / There is no way to walk away / From each other, for even then / We are coming back together.” This geography of hope transforms distance into proximity. The poem argues that allowing distance to grow creates the greatest intimacies, reframing separation as a curve that eventually reunites, making despair into an affirmation of interconnectedness.

13. In “The Truth in One Nation,” how does the speaker redefine “R.I.P.” and what role does optimism play?

The speaker of “The Truth in One Nation,” stopped by a police officer on a bike, performs innocence while reflecting on routine racialized violence. The poem redefines “R.I.P.” not as “Rest in Peace” but as pandemic ravaging, racial destruction, and societal decay. The pun on “Chauvin[ism]” directly indicts the officer who murdered George Floyd. Despite grief, the speaker chooses optimism over hope: “We’re optimistic, not because we have hope, / But because only by being optimistic can hope / Be ours to have.” Optimism becomes a deliberate practice, a strategic choice that creates the conditions for hope rather than passively awaiting it, a prayer for a “right & radiant & real” world.

14. How does “Practice Makes People” transform the cliché “practice makes perfect” into a philosophy of collective change?

The poem revises the adage to center people, not perfection. The collective “We” realizes that “tomorrow isn’t revealed, / Rather rendered, refined. Wrought.” Fate is fought for, not against. The vaccine arrives as “a pain we asked for,” a chosen wound that signifies agency and communal care. The closing line, “it is enough to be moved / By what we might be,” shifts focus from achieving a fixed future to the ongoing process of being transformed by possibility. Growth is not instant but a “wet-born thing learning to walk” through repeated stumbles, reframing endurance as a shared practice that makes people into who they are becoming.

15. In “Augury or The Birds,” why does Gorman argue that the only correct way to predict the future is “to pave it, is to brave it”?

Gorman reimagines ancient Roman augury—interpreting bird omens for divine approval—as a model for human agency. The augurs did not prophesy the future; they sought permission to act. The poem insists that genuine foresight comes from building and daring, not from passive interpretation. “The breakage is where we begin. / The rupture is for remembering.” This reframes wounds as sites of inauguration and consecration, not just injury. The image of a “suture of sun” holding the collective self together acknowledges that beginning again tears us apart, but also that the tearing is the start. To pave and brave is to accept that creation emerges from rupture, not from waiting.