Review: You Are Here: Poetry and the Natural World, edited by Ada Limón
Reviewed by Daniel DeVaughn
Milkweed Editions. 2024. 176 pages.
It’s all too easy nowadays to forget how beautiful the United States really is, its wildly diverse landscapes, its many national and state parks, its preserves, the vivid quilt of climates and ecological regions that comprise it. California alone boasts sixteen climate zones, and the network of waterways east of the Mississippi River is as biodiverse as any in the world. How much easier, then, to see ourselves as somehow removed from all this beauty, as encroachers, extractors, maybe sometime enjoyers, who are far more likely on any given day to see “nature” sifted through a screen than as something with which we are intimately connected, let alone something we embody? You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World arrives as an orientation and reminder that our, people’s, place in the gorgeous variety of our country’s wild (and not so wild) spaces is surprisingly local. It is as close as the flowers potted on the fire escape or the strip of grass near the road. Not only this, but as the editor and 24th United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón reminds us in her Introduction, “[n]ature is who we are.” That is to say, we not only live in or near nature, we are nature.
This anthology is just one half of “You Are Here,” Limón’s signature project as Poet Laureate, the other being “You Are Here: Poetry in the Parks,” which features poetry installations at seven national parks around the country. One of the many things I love about You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World is that it is as biodiverse as any thriving ecosystem, any forest. And like any forest, this book breathes. As Limón’s introduction puts it, “[P]oems are like trees in this way. They let us breathe together. In each line break, caesura, and stanza, there’s a place for us to breathe.” The anthology is made up of fifty poems that vary in length from six lines (“Letters” by Ilya Kaminsky) to five pages (“Aia I hea ka wai o Lahaina?” by Brandy Nālani McDougall, Dana Naone Hall, and No’u Revilla), and the poets themselves represent an impressive 25 different states if we include our Laureate, who calls Kentucky home. Through them, we encounter the sounds of wonder, joy, or praise—as in Kevin Young’s “Snapdragons,” Michael Kleber-Diggs’s “Canine Superpowers,” and Ashley M. Jones’s “Lullaby for the Grieving”—but also the need to protect our threatened ecologies (Paisley Rekdal’s “Taking the Magnolia”), anxiety about the precarity of future generations on this planet (Matthew Zapruder’s “It Was Summer, The Wind Blew”), rage and frustration over lives and natural resources senselessly wasted (Danez Smith’s awesome “Two Deer in a Southside Cemetery” and Roger Reeves’ virtuosic “Beneath the Perseids”), and questionings, imaginings of other paths forward, when we might learn to root in our place in the ecological webs in which we are enmeshed (Joy Harjo’s “Eat,” Patricia Smith’s “To Little Black Girls, Risking Flower,” and Ruth Awad’s “Reasons to Live”). To do so, the poems seem to say, begin with your breath; we will give you the words.
Many, if not all, of the poems in You Are Here gesture toward the future in this way, as if they were giving the reader instructions on how to continue. In this sense, they are firm in the ancient tradition of the English elegy, in which some thing, or some part of oneself (and here, what is the difference?) is mourned, or at least sung with lingering attention, before arriving at a final, consoling call toward what will be, what could be. “Here, poems serve as a witnessing as much as they do incantations,” Limón writes. This is an insistent declaration made and struck like a standing bell repeatedly throughout these pages, that people are not separate from nature. Nature is us, and we are it. And not only this, but we can’t afford not to see ourselves as part of the flora and fauna around us. The reasons for this are many, but Limón is keen to remind us that, first and foremost, the natural world and poems about it bring us back to ourselves by way of the breath, the voice, and our bodies. This alone can be a small but revolutionary act, a turning point in the often chaotic mundane. Poetry, in this sense, is radically, deeply therapeutic, helping us to live, to be able to recognize beauty again in the often ugly world. As Limón writes, “[P]oetry and nature have a way of simply reminding us that we are not alone.” Any prairie or river or forest will show you that a thriving habitat is a diverse, evolving community, and this anthology is no different.
I admire the communal focus of this book, its insistence on variety, exchange, openness, and interconnectedness. Quoting “the Kentucky writer bell hooks,” Limón writes, “‘Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.’ Going to the woods, or simply noticing the small defiant ways nature is thriving all around me on a daily basis, helps me feel that communion. And poems…help me feel that sense of communion too.” Carla Hayden, U.S. Librarian of Congress, extends the same sentiment in her Foreword when she writes, “While these poems emerge from deeply personal perspectives, together they reveal that nature, like poetry, is universal—and that our interpretations of the natural world are grounded in the nature of our humanity.” This book is like a mirror reflecting the lush and vivid tangle of the natural world we are, and for this reason I know that all readers will find something in it to enjoy and breathe with.
Daniel DeVaughn is the Reviews and Interviews Editor for the American Literary Review. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Poets.org, The Adroit Journal, Southern Humanities Review, The Nashville Review, Texas University Press’s Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. X: Alabama, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by the University of Oregon, the Vermont Studio Center, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and he is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. He is currently a Voertman-Ardoin Teaching Fellow at the University of North Texas, where he is pursuing a PhD in creative writing.