MixedThe StrangerCall Us What We Carry, Gorman’s first full-length book, will not satiate any of her social media critics. Nor can I call it a great collection. The smorgasbord of styles she tries to put together work less as the book progresses (especially the various prose poems), and her commendable yearning to reach as many people as possible too often doesn’t rise above platitudes ... an uneven collection isn’t a bad one. When Gorman steps away from being a public voice and weaves a gift for lyric landscape with her internal thought process on being a young person in a country in peril, she not only is as good as any young poet in the country but shows the potential to be as good as the masters she calls on ... Amanda Gorman isn\'t there yet, but she’s on her way. If you can’t earn your critique, don’t hinder her.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
PositiveThe Seattle Review of Books...a pensive, complex book. Interlacing memoir and essay, Coates reports on America after Barack Obama’s presidency with nuance and emotional weight ...a series of layered, interpersonal, and (in the end) heartbreaking stories about Coates and the America he reports on ...he intermixes the arguments he makes in his essays with prefaces that tell a narrative about his own personal growth as an intellectual and a human being ...a book more nuanced than any grand statement ... The absence of the grand imitation-Baldwin gesture in Coates’s personal reflections make him an organic, fluid character in Eight Years in Power...a brilliant writer who created a devastating book about the end of the second black reconstruction — and his critics as something other than a bunch of race-baiting internet trolls.
