As the United States consumes a great many hangover cures over the next few days—some of them administered, in calm and reassuring tones, by Certified America’s Dad Tom Hanks—we’re all going to have to adjust ourselves to a new reality. Like one where, say, our president patronizes a poet of note whose most famous verse doesn’t include the lines “Here I sit / broken-hearted, came to, well, you know.”
Case in point: The presence of 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman at the inauguration of Joe Biden earlier today. Gorman—the author of The One For Whom Food Is Not Enough, published in 2015—read her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the ceremony, having been recommended for the spot by Dr. Jill Biden. That makes her the youngest inaugural poet ever; it also makes her a new sensation on the Amazon charts, as she noted on Twitter that two of her books, both set to come out later this year, have now jumped up the charts to bestseller status. One is The Hill We Climb, featuring the poem she read at today’s ceremony, while the other, Change Sings, is a children’s book illustrated by Loren Long. (The One For Whom Food Is Not Enough doesn’t appear to be carried by Amazon, at least not at the moment.)
Gorman—also the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate, as it happens—happily noted the success on social media, also retweeting folks like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and more, who were—quite rightly—praising her performance at today’s event.