You Are Here

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World 

Ada Limón, Editor 

Milkweed Editions in association with The Library of Congress, 2024 

Hard cover: $24.00 

Genre: Poetry 

Reviewed by Wendy Cleveland 

Ada Limón, the 24th United States Poet Laureate, has established a two-part signature project to bring poetry to the people.  Launched in April of 2024, Poetry in the Parks will continue throughout the year with installments of poetry as public art on picnic tables in seven national parks. Each installation will feature a historic American poem that connects to the park and stimulates an appreciation for its natural surroundings. 

The second part of the project is the release of the anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, edited and introduced by Limón and published by Milkweed Editions in association with the Library of Congress.  Limón’s purpose is “to challenge what we think we know about our ‘nature poetry,’ illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes – both literal and literary – are changing.” 

The book contains fifty previously unpublished poems by some of the most accomplished American poets, including Joy Harjo, Jericho Brown, Dorianne Laux, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Carl Phillips, and Ashley Jones, among others.  While many of the poems reveal uplifting words of praise for natural wonders, there are also messages of concern about a rapidly changing natural environment. Limón hopes that reading and writing poems can bring us closer to the natural world: “With poems written for vast and inspiring vistas to poems acknowledging the green spaces that flourish even in the most urban of settings, this anthology hopes to reimagine what ‘nature poetry’ is during this urgent moment on our planet.” 

These fifty poems give us many ways of looking at the vast biodiversity of this country, from canyons to redwood forests to backyards, with messages of reverent beauty and optimistic hope for a world facing climate change. The poets whose works appear in this anthology are masters of language, describing the beauty of the natural world with images that linger and beg us to stop and observe. Traci Brimhall in “Mouth of the Canyon” describes the “little lives” of “ants pilgriming the road” and invites us to feel the wind and be alive “like rattlesnakes/making a cursive communion on the road/at night,” ending with this arresting image: “the snakes/curling their bodies into a yes.” 

Other creatures of the natural world exist close by, as Alberto Rios writes in “Twenty Minutes in the Backyard.” A sparrow attempting to pick up ground seed “flies through a bit of spider web” containing “a fly, a moth/Any number and manner of very small beast,” but the spider cannot hear their pleas to be released, cannot hear the sparrow that can reach it. Rios reminds us that if we listen, we might hear:

The great, bustling city of it all, 

The small sirens and screams 

The caterpillars backing up 

The geckos at their mysterious work. 

For those who love the sun, there’s Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “Heliophilia,” in which she says her love of sunlight is “an affection” rather than “an affliction.” With an eye for light and the creatures that thrive in its warmth, she shares her heliophilia with lyrical sounds: 

For me, the sun 

has always been easy to love, as easy 

as it is to love whatever small light 

 

bees bestow on fallen leaves – easy 

to love the light they give just before 

they crawl into a honey-hungry sleep, 

just before the first fall of snow. 

It’s not surprising that Limón chose national parks for the placement of poems. A forest of trees, giants in nature, can humble us with their size and history, their quiet dignity. In “Redwoods,” Dorianne Laux writes about her first time in a forest: 

I felt like I was 

climbing up those fungal discs 

toward something endless, beyond 

my birth and death, into my here-ness 

and now-ness, the scent and silence 

overwhelming me, seeping back 

into my pores. 

Reading poetry in a national park beneath majestic redwoods gives us great pleasure and appreciation for the natural world, but likewise, walking the California coast can evoke a heavenly sense of wellness. Camille T. Dungy recalls a memory of California while preparing dinner years later in Colorado in her poem “Remembering a Honeymoon Hike Near Drake Bay, California, While I Cook Our Dinner at the Feet of Colorado’s Front Range.” Repeating the word “unharmed” she brings back all the sensory details of this inlet that created for her the illusion of being “safe inside a cloud.” She remembers “the spineflower, checker lily, blue blossom…little native bees and yellow-faced bumble bees…the gossamer-winged butterflies…the lumbering grizzly.” 

Acknowledging the concerns of climate change, poets like Carolyn Forché remind us that some sounds are now silent: “a blurring of bees in the air/no longer heard.” Trees are cut down to make new roads: 

No canopy of hope. 

And the swamp? Who knows what became of it. 

Ashley M. Jones, however, in “Lullaby for the Grieving,” reminds us “to make small steps” because “in this wild place/there are signs of life/everywhere.” Along Alabama’s Sipsey River she observes: 

the tiny sounds 

of faraway birds. the safety 

in their promise of song. 

the puddle forming, finally 

after summer rain. 

the golden butterfly 

against the cave-dark. 

The poems in this collection connect us through our love of and appreciation for the myriad wonders of the natural world. Limón’s signature project, You Are Here, affords us the opportunity to think about how we experience nature through the gift of poetry. 

Wendy Cleveland is the author of Blue Ford: Poems.