Shakespeare in Amanda Gorman's Call Us What We Carry

Gorman, Amanda. Call Us What We Carry: Poems. New York: Viking, 2021. "School's Out" appears on pages 17 and 18.

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I've been waiting for a long time for this volume of Amanda Gorman's poetry. I was captivated by the poem she read at the most recent inauguration, and I wanted to see—and hear—more.

I didn't quite realize that I'd be getting some good Shakespeare in there as well.

At first, it seems somewhat incidental. There was an epigraph from Othello:

And a delightful purposefully-misquoted quote from Hamlet:

And then we get a poem relating to the COVID-19 lockdown in March of 2020 that closed most of the schools across the nation:

All that and more! The collection as a whole is remarkable. When you get it, try "Cordage, or Atonement" and "_ _ _ _ _ [Gated]" in particular.

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