The Past

Throughout Call Us What We Carry, the author considers the ways in which the past has influenced the present. Gorman particularly explores this notion in the context of United States History. In a poem like “Vale of the Shadow of Death or Extra! Extra! Read All About It!,” for example, the author parallels the outbreak of the Spanish influenza with the outbreak of the coronavirus. After describing “the first / recorded case” of the flu, the speaker asserts that “To tell the truth, then, is to risk / being remembered by its fiction” (82). She goes on to outline the falsities surrounding the flu’s representation in the past. She asserts that this heritage was “passed not in direct / recollection but through indi- / rect retelling” (82). The past, therefore, has been documented by the people in power. The same is true of the present, and in the context of...