Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom by Camonghne Felix is the most revelatory book I've read this year. Felix's memoir shares the story of finding their place in a world that tells all of us, including aspiring poets, that we must participate in the world through consumption, efficiency, and production.
It's also a treatise on the ways the powerful use their control over language to wield power, weaken, and exclude people like her. Those who control power can use language set the terms of their control. But we should also remember that those who understand language, can use it to challenge, create, inspire, and even shift what we know, in our bones, is possible.
The book is a finalist for the 2026 National Book Award for nonfiction.
The book's lyricism shines brightest, perhaps in the final chapter. I'll offer a couple quotes including this one on how poetry creates possibility.
What does a poet have and what does the poem allow for the poet? It allows for flight or departure, for return.
It allows for the defamiliarization and disruption of the factory of everyday language and the factories of rhetoric.
When I ask the end of a question about the beginning, language returns to me a fact.
When I ask a question about ambition, poetry responds with possibility.
This is true for the good poets and the bad poets. We set the terms for freedom.
This passage speaks to the shared, if unspoken, sense of calamity that surrounds us all today. All that we need is here. All that we need to provide for all is here, within reach, if only we choose to understand the mutuality of care for others, the land, the air, the water.
We must fight to receive what we have inherited. As in, if the Earth decides we still fit into its ecosystem of health then we must commit ourselves to its nature, to its fundamental needs, to our implicit agreement.
It means that we do not poison the oxygen we must all breathe, that we do not define the Earth by the harms we create. The Earth is not resisting. We are failing to understand our responsibility to it.
The wells are not rebelling. We are failing to understand our relationship to them.
Earning our keep is about reciprocity. It is about respecting the absolute privilege of living in a rich world, a world that gives great ease to the needs of humans, that provides everything a human needs: water, food, housing, community, pleasure, light, warmth.
What we know about the living world is already enough to establish a relationship of mutuality, of generosity, of investment, of care.
Our members and supporters look to us for guidance, insight, and guidance on how to care for our community, family, and environment. We should ask so much more of our language, our writers, our communicators, and leaders.