Speaker

Although each of the poems in Call Us What We Carry is written from the perspective of a unique speaker, the reader might notice correlations between these speakers. Indeed, she might even understand the speakers to be a single entity, whose identity is largely inextricable from that of the author, Amanda Gorman.

Throughout the collection, the speaker predominantly employs first person plural pronouns. She is therefore marrying her individual perspective and voice with those of her global, national, and local community members’. Indeed, in a poem like “Call Us,” for example, the speaker asserts that “We are not me— / We are we” (35). Her voice is not representative of the collective’s voice. Therefore, the speaker is not implying that her individual outlook and lens are those of the entire population. Instead, she is saying that if the individual members of the collective join their voices one with another...