Gwendolyn Brooks / Ross Gay

National Poetry Month continues, so this week I returned to my pile of saved poems and decided to write about not one, but two: Gwendolyn Brook’s “To the Young Who Want to Die” and Ross Gay’s “Sorrow Is Not My Name.” Ordinarily, I wouldn’t choose to write about two different poems from two different writers at the same time, but the fact is that one would not exist without the other: they are in dialogue with each other. And anyway, they’re both wonderful and very dear to me.