You Are Here - Poetry in the Natural World

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
A 2024 NPR "Books We Love" Selection

"Whoever you are, you will find yourself and your own world in the expansiveness of this collection."
-Margaret Renkl, New York Times

Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by fifty of our most celebrated contemporary writers.

In recent years, our poetic landscape has evolved in profound and exciting ways. So has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, this book challenges what we think we know about "nature poetry," illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes-both literal and literary-are changing.

You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation's most accomplished poet s, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author's local landscape-be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop-offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.

Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what "nature" and "poetry" are today, inviting readers to experience both anew.

Inhaltsverzeichnis:

Foreword by Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress





Introduction by Ada Limón





Carrie Fountain, You Belong to the World


Donika Kelly, When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Truly Alongside


Joy Harjo, Eat


Kevin Young, Snapdragons


Eduardo C. Corral, To a Blossoming Saguaro


Diane Seuss, Nature Which Cannot Be Driven To


Victoria Chang, A Woman and a Bird


Gabrielle Calvocoressi, An Inn for the Coven


Khadijah Queen, Tower


José Olivarez, You Must Be Present


Dorianne Laux, Redwoods


b ferguson, Parkside & Ocean


Brandy Nalani McDougall, Dana Naone Hall, and No'u Revilla, Aia i hea ka wai o Lahaina?


Ashley M. Jones, Lullaby for the Grieving


Ilya Kaminski, Letters


Carl Phillips, We Love in the Only Ways We Can


Brenda Hillman, Unend angered Moths of the Mid-Twentieth Century


Laura Da', Bad Wolf


Molly McCully Brown, Rabbitbrush


Ellen Bass, Lighthouse


Traci Brimhall, Mouth of the Canyon


Jericho Brown, Aerial View


Michael Kleber-Diggs, Canine Superpowers


Monica Youn, Four Freedoms


Hanif Abdurraqib, There Are More Ways to Show Devotion


Cedar Sigo, Close Knit Flower Sack


Carolyn Forché, Nightshift in the Home for Convalescents


Analicia Sotelo, Quemado, TX


Cecily Parks, Hackberry


Danez Smith, Two Deer in a Southside Cemetery


Paul Guest, Walking the Land


Paisley Rekdal, Taking the Magnolia


Matthew Zapruder, It Was Summer, The Wind Blew


Prageeta Sharma, I am Learning to Find the Horizons of Peace


Roger Reeves, Beneath the Perseids


Kazim Ali, The Man in 119


torrin a. greathouse, No Ethical Transition U nder Late Capitalism


Rigoberto González, Summer Songs


Adam Clay, Darkling, I Listen


Camille Dungy, Remembering a Honeymoon Hike


Erika Meitner, Manifesto of Fragility / Terraform


Jake Skeets, In Fire


Paul Tran, Terroir


Jason Schneiderman, Staircase


Kiki Petrosino, To Think of Italy While Climbing


Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Heliophilia


Jennifer L. Knox, Central Iowa, Scenic Overlook


Alberto Rios, Twenty Minutes in the Backyard


Patricia Smith, To Little Black Girls, Risking Flower


Ruth Awad, Reasons to Live





Notes


Acknowledgments