A lot of nature poetry is the lyric equivalent of the art you find at a dentist’s office. Pleasant, apolitical, inoffensive, scrubbed of human struggle: it appeals to everyone, which ultimately renders it a little boring. For the lazy poet angling for an easy epiphany, nature offers a cheat code: stick a mountain or a sunset in your poem and find a shortcut to the sublime.

That’s my hot take on the genre, anyway. And so it was with some trepidation that I opened You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, an anthology of nature poems edited and introduced by poet Ada Limón as she wraps up her tenure as the 24th US Poet Laureate.

But I quickly got over myself. The fifty poems in this book are warm, haunting, funny, furious, anxious, hopeful and wise— not an anodyne ode among them. They embrace a generous conception of nature, from the redwood to the house spider. Appropriate for a collection titled You Are Here, every poem evokes a specific place, and some of them are indeed majestic and “unspoiled”: the mouth of a canyon, a redwood forest. But we also visit backyard trees, a convalescent home, a shower stall, a hotel swimming pool. Are these nature, too? Our Poet Laureate Limón says yes.

This expansive definition of nature gets explicit elaboration in Dianne Seuss’s poem “Nature, Which Cannot Be Driven To,” which begins: “To drive to it is to drive through it.” We sometimes act like nature is located in discrete preserves we visit and then leave, but  it is everywhere. Everything is a part of nature, including us–hence the term “human nature,” which  describes those things we can’t change about ourselves. The poem flexes this phrase along with other shades of the word’s meaning: “Nature is how you were born.” “Nature is you, and the doing to it, / and your platitudes, and the wishing/ you could do more…” By the time I finished this poem, it occurred to me that the book’s subtitle, Poetry In The Natural World, could just as well read… Poetry In The World. But if nature is everything, what isn’t a nature poem? If the category is so wide that it becomes meaningless, then how does this nature anthology justify its existence?  

The answer lies in two threads that unite every poem here. The first is a rootedness in the actual here and now. In “A Woman With a Bird,” poet Victoria Chang’s speaker has become alienated from her very self: “The distance between my life and myself had become too far.” But watching a pair of eagles heals this rift: “I felt something in my body attach... my life was with me again.” Nature poems encourage us to pay attention, to locate ourselves not only in a specific time and place, but in history and in the cosmos as well.

The second common thread is a connectedness to something larger than ourselves. Limón writes in her introduction that “poetry and nature have a way of simply reminding us that we are not alone.” This web of connection permeates Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s joyous, queer, witchy poem “An Inn for the Coven,” which ends: “Jasmine/ in the rooms at night. All loves/ protected. All of us playing/ cribbage on the lawn.” In another poem, Hanif Abdurraqib finds kinship with the spider who respins its web above the bed each night. “I make the bed in the mornings now every day,” he writes; “it looks new again like no one has ever been in it.” Connections arise between poet and reader, as well: Camille T. Dungy’s gorgeous description of the private landscape that exists between two lovers felt profoundly relatable to me, even incorporating the same California coastline where I fell in love with my spouse. The breadth of subjects here means that virtually everyone who spends time with this book will find something that speaks to their own life experience.  

By grounding itself in nature, this generous collection finds space to engage with human ills from climate change to racism to the displacement of indigenous peoples to harsh treatment of immigrants. Danez Smith’s otherworldly poem “Two Deer in a Southside Cemetery” is written in a deer’s voice (“we were here before the people/ & here before the people who ate the people”), yet delivers a very human protest against oppression, invoking the murder of George Floyd without saying his name directly. My favorite passage from the book comes from Eduardo C. Corral’s stunning fourteen-line poem called “To a Blossoming Saguaro”:

The sky is a century with no windows.

I say things like that. Sorry.

You have more rights than the undocumented:

I need a permit to uproot you.

Ofelia believes only rain can touch all of you.

My mother is my favorite immigrant.

After her? The sonnet.

The diversity of voices represented in this book is apparent and impressive. In this collection entitled You Are Here, queer and trans writers, differently abled writers, old and young writers, Black and Lebanese and Indian-Filipina and Jewish and Mexican-American and Ukrainian writers  say, We are here. This self-expression reaches a strutting, exuberant peak in the poem “Aerial View,” another collection highlight, in which poet Jericho Brown contrasts lions (“all roar and hunt,/ Quick fucks and blond manes”) with the giraffes he identifies with (“I’m already tall and long-necked./ In the real Sahara, a giraffe beats/ A lion’s ass every day/ On Instagram.”).

Readers will find unfamiliar perspectives here that can invite them to broader empathy with another. The poem “Aia I Hea Ka Wai O Lahaina?” by Brandy Nalani McDougall, Dana Naone Hall and No’u Revilla, contains significant passages written in Hawaiian. I couldn’t understand them—and that’s okay. I could still let the music of the words wash over me, and absorb this encounter with language that wasn’t translated for my convenience —a common experience for many minoritized people, but rare for me as an English speaker in the US.

Of course, not every poem here resonated with me, even when I could understand all the words. Some I read over and over; a few, I skimmed and forgot. And since I’m not writing an ode here, I can name a couple of other shortcomings. For one, I wish the editor gave us more insight into how she put this book together: did she choose poets, or poems? Were these pieces written specially for the anthology? What were her criteria? Limón’s introduction hints at what unifies the collection in her eyes, but I would have loved more insight into her selection process. I also would have appreciated a few more new and less-established voices; most of the poets here are heavyweights who have been collecting accolades for a long time. I understand their inclusion in this flagship national project, but I also think this could have been a powerful medium for elevating more underappreciated poets.

Nevertheless, this remains a stellar collection with broad appeal. I can imagine recommending it with equal enthusiasm both to my friend who majored in Comp Lit and to my boomer dad, who says he doesn’t really “get poetry.” Both of them would connect instinctively to the book’s central affirmation: everything belongs to nature.

It’s an idea that’s both daunting and liberating. If we humans are a part of nature—same as the spider, the mountain and the redwood—then we aren’t special. As Donika Kelly writes in her poem “When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Truly Alongside”:

what I am looking for doesn’t matter.

that I am looking doesn’t matter.

I exert no meaning.

To us human creatures so preoccupied with making meaning, that perspective can be terrifying, but relinquishing our special status brings us into the fold. It’s right there in the title of the book’s opening poem, by Carrie Fountain: “You belong to the world.” Wherever we go, we are here: we are home.

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