On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance

While no critic has defined it as a movement, several American poets between 2000-2020 turned to closer examinations of the natural world in their work, to comment on and correlate them to the human experience. While natural metaphor has had a place in poetry since its inception, there are times when the environmental world takes center stage to recall a memory in wonder and awe. This can be seen in poems from this decade by Nezhukumatathil as well as Ross Gay, Ada Limón, Maggie Smith, and Ilya Kaminsky. In their work, the poets use nature as a touchstone to bring the speakers to a sense of inclusion within the wider world. These poets consistently acknowledge the brutality of life and nature but encourage their speakers to find hope in it as well, whether in the ocean, the garden, or the field populated by hawks and horses. Nezhukumatathil in particular undertakes the making of such correlations with the fervor of a naturalist. While she’ll alter personal facts for the good of the narrative, she won’t change scientific ones: “[All] the science and nature elements I include in my poems have been triple checked and/or extensively researched to be as accurate as possible.