You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, Edited by Ada Limón

Whether you’re new to reading poetry or an avid fan, you’ll love this anthology, which contains poems from many of the most-read (and best, in my opinion) poets in America today. All the poems in You Are Here have a link to the natural world and to place. They are quite-literally grounded. And they’re accessible and impactful and beautiful. Take, for example, the quiet beauty in the poem “Lullaby for the Grieving” by Ashley M. Jones, Poet Laureate of Alabama:

make small steps.

in this wild place

there are signs of life

everywhere.

sharp spaces, too:

the slip of a rain-glazed rock

against my searching feet.

small steps, like prayers—

each one a hope exhaled

into the trees. please,

let me enter. please, let me

leave whole . . .

Or consider the exploration of the human in the animal from Jericho Brown’s “Aerial View”

People who romanticize an Africa

They’ve never seen

Like to identify themselves

With lions. It’s all roar and hunt,

Quick fucks and blond manes.

People love the word pride.

Haven’t you seen the parades?

Everyone adores a lion

But me. I want to be a giraffe . . .

And a final outtake from the many (almost every) page I have dogeared in this collection, the beginning of the poem “Staircase” by Jason Schneiderman:

I’m not coping very well, but who is, really? I’m somatiziing stress,

sleeping badly, eating too much candy, drinking too much alcohol,

forgetting to exercise or hydrate properly, falling behind on everything,

and the sun today is an alarmingly dull shade of orange, a well-cut circle

of marigold construction paper in a pale rust sky. I am looking directly

at the sun because the ash clouds from the wild fires a country away

have settled over this place so think and so heavy that the brightness

and the yellow have been stripped from the sun’s rays before they reach

my eyes, the particulate haze bouncing back the splendor, diffusing it.

The news says that being outside today is the equivalent of smoking

five cigarettes, but I can’t stop staring at the egg yolk sun because it feels,

I don’t know, important, like I have to bear witness . . .

Buy your copy here: https://milkweed.org/book/you-are-here